Category Archives: New York

The Four-Hour Art Week? Read Carol Bove’s Self-Help Guide for Artists

The sculptor Carol Bove likes to play with associations and forms as she builds her assemblages of constructed and readymade objects. Time and space to experiment are crucial elements of her process, as is a certain psychological sovereignty—Bove writes that “creating a nonpurposive, free space in which to play and have fun is essential.” Here, the Brooklyn-based artist gives her best advice for finding happiness (rather than “succeeding”) as an artist, excerpted in its entirety from the new book AKADEMIE X: Lesson in Art + Life.

WORK

Years ago, from 1995–2000, I used to live in an illegal loft building under the Manhattan Bridge. It was one of the few artists’ buildings in DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) at the time, and it was known for its ridiculous DIY door buzzers. On the ground floor was a paper recycling plant and there were always clouds of flies. There must have been more than a hundred people living there, along with lots of dogs and other pets. One loft housed a black-market exotic animal dealer. When he was busted, people claimed to have seen a kangaroo, but all I ever saw, when he once held the front door open for me, was a box full of prairie dogs.

A friend of mine lived upstairs and he was photographing a special breed of butterfly that he’d mail-ordered in advance of his participation at the Venice Biennale. He was planning to make a butterfly garden there. While he was out getting lunch one day, a neighbor’s cat hunted and killed every one of his subjects. It was a disaster for him, but I couldn’t help laughing, even though I think of myself as a very kind and sympathetic friend. It was just so thrilling that this art-studio problem was so common, primal, fragile, fantastical, violent, and yet silly, all at the same time. It makes me laugh even now as I’m writing. A cat hunting butterflies is a much clearer, more available image of the drama of a studio emergency than “I overworked my painting.”

Two German girls lived in the loft next to mine and I overheard them talking one day. I wasn’t eavesdropping – the old industrial building was crudely constructed to begin with and the additions were all makeshift, so noise traveled. For several months the sounds in my studio consisted of someone sculpting with a chainsaw (upstairs), continuous jazz practice (downstairs), and the German girls talking (next door). I only understood a few words of German at the time. I knew the word for work: arbeit. So as they talked I would hear a string of syllables and then this word, arbeit … another string of syllables, arbeit … string of syllables, arbeit … I couldn’t believe how much they used the word. And I wondered to myself if I used that word as often.

I decided to stop using the word “work” as an experiment. It was very difficult! I had to compensate by substituting a more specific description of the activity. For example, instead of “I’m going to my studio to work,” I’d have to say, “I’m going to make some drawings.” Or instead of “I’m going to work around the house,” I’d have to say, “I’m going to clean the kitchen and fold some laundry.” I discovered that the absence of the word ‘work’ forced me to reconsider assumptions about leisure, because the idea of work implied its opposite. I let go of the notion that I deserved a certain amount of downtime from being productive or from being active. The labour/leisure dichotomy became uncoupled and then dissolved. I couldn’t use labour to allay guilt or self-punish or feel superior. Work didn’t exist, so all the psychological payoff of work for work’s sake had nowhere to go.

WHAT IS AN ARTIST’S ACTIVITY IF IT’S NOT WORK?

I started to adjust my thinking about productivity so that it was no longer valued in and of itself. It strikes me as vulgar always to have to apply a cost/benefit analysis to days lived; it’s like understanding an exchange of gifts only as barter. The work exercise made me feel as if I was awakening from one of the spells of capitalism. And there was more to it than that: I was able to begin the process of withdrawal from my culture’s ideology around the instrumentality of time, i.e. that you can use time. I think the ability to withdraw from consensus reality is one of the most important skills for an artist to learn because it helps her to recognize invisible forces.

TIME AND INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Your time is not a separate thing from you; it’s not an instrument. Time is part of what you’re made from. Emerson said, “A man is what he thinks about all day long.” Everything that you do and think about is going to be in your artwork. The computer-science idea “garbage in, garbage out” applies to artists. This is something to consider when you’re choosing your habitual activities.

One question is, how do you create a way of being in the world that allows new things (ideas, information, people, places) into your life without letting everything in? I want to point out that your tolerance for media saturation might be lower than you realize. You need to conduct an open-ended search that doesn’t overwhelm you with information and at the same time doesn’t limit the search in a way that pre-determines your findings. That is a puzzle.

The first self-help book I want to recommend is The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. This book is based on the idea of artistic recovery, similar to Alcoholics Anonymous, but it’s recovery for a stuck artist. I don’t consider myself stuck, but I still get a lot out of most of the exercises. Cameron addresses the idea of work and to a certain extent, information management, but the book came out in 1992, before the internet really came into our lives. She understands the creative process and how to teach it; the techniques she describes work. I know what you’re thinking: “Carol, I’m scared. That sounds New Agey.” I can’t promise you that it will help you or that you will like it or that your friends won’t tease you for reading it. But I can promise that it won’t diminish your critical faculties, or your intellectual ability, or your access to rational thought or anything like that. If you’re scared or squeamish about New Agey sounding books, I say that’s all the more reason to read them. A willingness to take psychological risks is another one of the most important skills for an artist to develop.

The other self-help book I want to recommend is Tim Ferris’s The 4-Hour Workweek. What’s the opposite of New Agey? Hiring a virtual assistant in India to take care of your everyday tasks, as Ferris recommends. I didn’t take that particular piece of advice, but his techniques for time-management, dealing with information overload and email addiction are really helpful. I also liked some of his ideas regarding income automation.

UNCENSORING

Before I went to New York University to get my bachelor’s degree, and after an initial attempt at art school that only lasted a semester, I took several years off. I quickly realized in my first attempt that at the rate I was going there was way I was going to be transformed into an artist by the school and that I’d be better off waiting till I was ready to apply myself. It was a wise decision, but it didn’t come from intellect; I simply knew in an urgent, emotional way that I wasn’t capable of getting anything out of the classroom at that time. I was lucky that my parents didn’t pressure me to complete school. On the contrary; they were paying for it and reasoned that if I couldn’t get straight As in the first semester of art school I was wasting their money. (Here’s something that strikes me as very different now from back then in 1988: in those days, going to art school wasn’t considered a reasonable thing to do. The reasonable people went into graphic design or architecture or something with a practical application. Art school was for irresponsible freakazoids with no plan. Or you could say, romantics. Now, it seems as if there’s a perception that going to art school is part of a clear career path that you can follow towards a respectable profession. The market is bigger and can support more people, sure, but if it seems as if there is a clear path, that’s an illusion. Academicism, professionalism, bureaucracy, and officialdom are all toxic to artmaking. They are necessary interference and shaping obstacles, not facilitators.)

Going back to school was great – after fourteen semesters off, I was ready. The worst part about being back in school was making art and having to explain it at the same time. It made it impossible for me to feel safe when experimenting. As a consequence of my profound self-doubt and insecurity, I was censoring what I really felt compelled to make, reasoning that since I was stupid, whatever I truly wanted to make would be stupid. I thought I would be better off faking it.

As soon as I got out of school, I was very curious to know what exactly it was that I was censoring, because the repression was so assiduous that I had absolutely no idea what it might be. I decided to try an experiment. I would make whatever I wanted for three months with the understanding that I would not show what I dredged up. Not to anyone. But I felt the need to discover my secret.

I can tell you now, since a lot of time has passed, that I discovered I wanted to draw portraits of pretty women. It seemed dumb at first, but I was patient and nonjudgmental and just let my desire take me wherever it wanted to go, and that’s been my modus operandi ever since.

Creating a nonpurposive, free space in which to play and have fun is essential. You can tell when you’re looking at art that was a drag to make: it’s a drag to look at. On the other hand, it’s thrilling to watch someone work through a problem that’s exciting for him, even if the subject matter wouldn’t normally move you.

I’ve watched kids playing with exciting, fun toys like bubble guns – they’re good for ten minutes. But something like a doctor’s kit that allows them to rehearse the drama of their lives is inexhaustibly interesting; they’ll carry it everywhere for months. Your art should be like that kind of toy. It may be an intellectual project, but it needs to be invested with your psychic life and driven by emotional necessity.

This uncensoring exercise was so helpful for me. I recommend it. I did it in my late twenties, when I already had some education and experience and I was trying to find an authentic way to respond to all the ideas and artworks that already existed or that were coming into existence around me.

RHYTHM OF WORKING

The format of school dictates a certain rhythm or pace of working. In the same way that in the Law and Order universe a murderer needs to be caught and brought to justice in roughly fifty minutes, artworks need to be completed and critiqued during the semester. I get the feeling that people set their speed in school and then it’s reinforced by the art-fair schedule, and with the multiplying venues, our ability to fly cheaply and send high-res images instantly, everything is accelerating. But it’s up to you to decide whether or not your work benefits from that pace. I always find Jay DeFeo’sThe Rose inspiring when I need a reminder that it doesn’t have to happen so fast.

MONEY

Becoming an artist is not a good business plan.

GETTING A CAREER

I’m assuming you want to be an artist for life. I can see that people in their twenties have a lot of anxiety when their peers are showing and they’re not, and I worried about that too. But I understand now that it’s not a race and I wish I hadn’t wasted all that energy worrying. In almost every instance I can think of, getting off to an early start hasn’t been an advantage to artists’ careers. You probably shouldn’t even get serious about showing your work in a commercial context until you’re close to thirty. Until then, it’s best to observe. While you’re learning how the art world works, keep the stakes low. That’s to say, keep the career stakes low. It’s never the wrong time to embrace psychological risk.

I’ve just more or less equated selling with career, but those things are not equivalent and it’s obviously more complicated than that. The Gift: The Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, a book by Lewis Hyde, has been particularly helpful for me in adopting the right attitude to releasing artworks into the market. It contains an analysis of gift economies that develops a picture of unalienated labour. The first half of the book, which looks at gift-giving practices in tribal society and in folklore, has shaped my thinking even more than the treatments on artistic expression in the second half.

HISTORY

You do need to know some art history. As a producer of art objects/gestures, the conventions you decide to ignore and the conventions you decide to repeat are as important, if not more so, than what you invent. If you’re a total novice start with Cubism to Surrealism and then study 1945–75, then take it from there.

Everybody my age read Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. If you ever want to understand something about our subconscious, our unarticulated assumptions, you could get some clues from that book. The theory of the 1980s is important for the very reason that it formed our mentality, but it has receded from our conscious thoughts. The subconscious realm of unarticulated assumptions is a powerful, invisible shaping force in the world.

FINDING YOURSELF

Artwork comes from the total personality: ego, self, id, conscious and unconscious, transpersonal, linguistic and nonlinguistic, historically determined, sensual, emotional, physical, mental, ideological, and cultural. I believe that in order to make something that’s meaningful you have to start by figuring yourself out psychologically. In order to figure myself out I’ve applied different modes of critique such as Marxism, feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, history, ayurvedic principles, philosophy, Feldenkrais technique, anthropology, astrology, the physiology of perception, contemplating life as a caveman, health-food regimens, psychedelic experiences, reading self-help books, ebay, falling in love, practicing magical rites, teaching, the scientific method, psychotherapy, yoga, meditation, and dharmic traditions, fasting and other austerities, exercise, napping, resonance repatterning, literature and poetry, friendships, parenting, humour, and countless others. Artwork is self-expression, and clearly I’m talking about a notion of self that radiates far outside of one’s body or even one’s time.

Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is completely different every time I read it. He’s making a projection about what will happen as a result of images becoming reproducible, and we have to use all of our powers of imagination to dismantle our media environment for long enough to know what he must have meant. And then we compare this reflection to the text measured against our own time. I also often come back to one line from the essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”

Maccarone
September 7 to October 19, 2013
630 Greenwich Street
New York City, 212-431-4977

Installation view of Carol Bove, RA, or Why is an orange like a bell? Photo Credit: EPW Studio/Maris Hutchinson. Courtesy of the artist and Maccarone, New York.

Carol Bove does not consider her art in terms of its site-specificity, which might come as a surprise considering her recent projects for institutions such as the Highline and the Museum of Modern Art. Hers is a more holistic approach to site specificity as a call-and-response between a sculpture, its materials, and the surrounding environment. In an interview with Art in America in May 2012, Bove explains: “My sculptures can and must be taken apart and then put back together. Disaggregation is important. Therefore, each element needs to maintain its individual identity, its autonomy.” This is why I find it particularly worrisome that the press releases and texts in situ introducing two of her ongoing sculpture installations in New York City, Caterpillar at the Highline Park (through May 2014) and Equinox at MoMA (through January 2014), recommend allegorical interpretations of the art based solely on their material or textual components.

It is Bove’s solo show at Maccarone, her second with the gallery, titled RA, or Why is an orange like a bell? that most thoroughly escapes this trap of over interpretation. The work in all three exhibitions share materials: concrete, brass, cast steel, and powder-finished steel; unlike the outdoor installation on the Highline and the show at MoMA, the gallery pieces are not physically bolted down and hence not corralled by a specific space and its host of references. RA, or Why is an orange like a bell? confounds traditional notions of artistic authorship and object category. Only six of the twelve works listed are attributed to Bove herself, who regularly folds the works of others into her own shows in what she calls “forced collaborations.” Among Bove’s six works, a large percentage of the materials were industrially fabricated or found, and their identity as “artworks” is complicated by this sense of previous history. Just past the gallery’s entrance is one of Bove’s simplest and most eloquent works—an untitled sculpture in the round, made in 2013, in which a slab of petrified wood is fastened to one edge of a steel beam towering almost a dozen feet tall. Here, the support structure is an essential armature, and the fossilized organism an animated protagonist in comparison.

One of her most virtuosic displays is Peel’s foe, not a set animal, laminates a tone of sleep (2013). The work consists of delicate brass open cubes and rectangles screwed into intricate formations and woven into the openings of a concrete pillar. Even though not all the shapes implemented are regular cubes, the edges of both materials contribute to the contours of a regular grid when viewed straight on. As one walks around the piece, however, the tidy geometry ebbs into formal chaos before straightening itself again. The same could be said of her two white powder coated steel sculptures, Solar Feminine and Hieroglyph (both 2013), whose forms yawn and contract when observed in rotation, and I-Beam Sculpture (2013), which is set low to the ground and becomes nearly indistinct from it at certain angles. In all these works, Bove’s aforementioned notion of disaggregation is not merely a physical phenomenon, but an optical one.

The remaining works in the presentation were made by Lionel and Joanne Ziprin, Harry Smith, Richard Berger, and other unnamed members of their Lower East Side bohemian circle from the 1950s and ‘60s. Their contributions include a glass vitrine of anonymous doodles, scraps, and more complete works on paper (ca. 1951-1955). These, the list of works informs us, are not meant to be scrutinized for their content, but to be “illustrative of the creative atmosphere of the Ziprin circle”—much in the way the books in Bove’s iconic George Nelson shelf sculptures operate as cultural indicators rather than texts. The centerpiece of the show, if such a work exists, is Harry Smith’s Design for Qor Corporation (ca. 1960), a diminutively sized painting on cardboard sporting a brash red and green grid-like pattern with Celtic affinity. It is suspended high between two large panes of glass—a two-dimensional vitrine—such that one can’t look at the Smith painting without seeing other works in periphery. In a brilliant multi-dimensional play, this work is at once a motif, a shadow, and a physical intervention, imprinted upon the show without leaving an actual trace.

The artist does not make explicit why she chose the Ziprin circle’s works to feature alongside her own. The choice was certainly not incidental or merely aesthetic; in conjunction with her Maccarone show, Bove co-curated with Philip Smith a reading-room of Ziprin and Harry Smith ephemera a few blocks away at 98 Morton Street. In this appendix-like exhibition are works from the duo’s short-lived design company Qor Collective and other eccentric commercial projects like Inkweed Studios. When Lionel Ziprin passed away in 2009, he left behind an epic volume of poetry, which included the autobiographical lines: “I am not an artist. I am not an / outsider. I am a citizen of the / republic and I have remained / anonymous all the time by choice.” Nine years ago, Bove offered a companion statement in an interview with the curator Beatrix Ruf: “It has to be apparent that the piece was put together for this particular occasion, in this particular space, which exists in a particular cultural context at a particular moment in time. […] The objects are assembled from non-art objects and my fantasy is that they could return to a state of non-art.”

The show probably leaves room for an essay to be written about the link between Ziprin and co.’s Kabbalistic undertakings and the spiritual inflections in Bove’s titles, but I believe that it is unwise to give too much emphasis to cross-interpretation. Rather than looking at either body of work as an index, allegory, and appendage to the other, we should regard RA as a staged meeting of kindred objects that we are invited to observe before everything disbands again

Carol Bove and Steven Claydon

Material fidelity

Carol Bove: The editor who commissioned this conversation suggested we might talk about modernism, but I’m not really thinking about modernism anymore, or anyway not particularly.

Steven Claydon: I have similar misgivings about modernism and what is expected of one’s practice. I was trying to figure out my own brief flirtation with the idea and realized it provided an expedient vessel from which to address a wider set of issues. I was thinking about your work and it seems to me that your relationship with modernism was very autobiographical and reflected a particular set of impressions from growing up in Berkeley during a kind of swan-song period in modernism. I like that you mentioned science fiction, as the genre fulfills a similar role for me, considering a future projection as cherished memory. I find it puzzling that science fiction can sometimes assume a role of actualized experience for people. Expectations of the future can also influence industry and policy.

I have been trying to wrestle with the notion of “material fidelity,” something distinct from truth to materials, and I suppose a notion that also allows for a kind of “material infidelity” or even treachery with the things one makes. What do you think in relation to your work?

CB: I like the idea of material infidelity or treachery. The feeling from the word ‘treachery’ rings with some of the dark tones in your work. I played with the dialectic of authenticity and fraudulence for a while, which is either the same problem or one with a lot of attachment points. I couldn’t define authentic art without cornering myself and eventually I got exhausted from the chase. Fraudulence is a little easier to approach. You can’t talk about “truth in materials” because it’s unfashionable, and besides, that discussion comes with a lot of historical baggage. Or simply said, it’s a historical idea. Doesn’t the understanding that materials are already heavily implicated take part in “material fidelity”?

SC: Authenticity and truth is an impossible territory and, as you said, consigned to history. We could, however, contemplate the potential of art catalyzing an original encounter. I think certain thinkers were referring to this when they talk about truth and authenticity. I am also more reconciled to the artwork as a sort of prop or vehicle for the suspension of disbelief. Could you ever see that as a useful way of considering your own work?

CB: Your use of the word ‘prop’ leads me to alternating images of your work, first as a makeshift scaffold in relation to a human form and then as a stage-bound object that is the most succinct expression of an alternate reality. One of my great attractions to becoming a cultivated art viewer is the practice I get in taking mutually exclusive positions. To be concrete I would mention The Oracle, a sculpture I made earlier this year. With a sculpture like that I think about corporate lobby art, a Roman bust, a Brancusi, the display of fragmented antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum and shells as interior design motifs.

SC: The Oracle was, for me, the defining piece in your show at Kimmerich last year in New York. I have for a long time considered this a-parallel approach to be the only appropriate way to construe my own things as that is how I perceive others. I see it as a climate of these discrete properties and narrative trajectories that describe an orbit around an errant core. Joseph Conrad talked about narrative in a similar way when he refers to the “yarns of seamen.” Conrad likens a tale to a nut; the story weaves itself around its subject to form a shell that smothers the kernel and never refers directly to it but recalls the kernel by allusion.

CB: Conrad’s nut is such a good image for what you’re doing. I wanted to recall the conversation we had a few years ago, concerning assistant use, etc. I’ve been asking myself, is this the kind of artist I want to be, i.e., somebody who runs a small production shop? I had more of an image of taking mushrooms in a cave in North Africa when this vocation hailed me.

SC: Believe me, I would love to accommodate some of that beatnik stuff again, but once you get started, expedience dictates that you have a responsibility to your profession that often precludes hedonism.

CB: I often feel I’m neglecting my responsibility to the world through my wanton capitulation to market demands. And that’s not to set practical considerations at odds with a romantic ideal, but accepting the market as part of the world that the work inhabits. Not incidental, but essential to the objects themselves. I think about working into the primitive zone of commerce, appealing to the desire to consume and possess as a way to set ideas loose into the world. It’s a little perverted. But then it’s the perverted feeling that makes it seem interesting, and I go back in the shop instead of working on something less tangible. Part of “material fidelity” is bringing together combinations of materials, which might be matter but might also take the form of shapes or finishes, to arouse a feeling of inappropriate sexuality. The materials need to have integrity as individual elements to aggregate with erotic effect. And unfortunately “expensive looking” is one of the tones that turns me on.

SC: I’d like to pick up on your thoughts concerning the role of seduction, surface, etc. There is a danger of importing or appropriating fully fledged material with the aesthetic intact, and I can think of a number of artists who are in the curious position of being seduced by the subject matter they set out to critique. Having said that, there is something vital in sailing too close to the spectacle and entertaining the specter of style. There are multiple aspect ratios at play here. I think I can detect these strategies at play in your work. I see no contradiction in combining wistful or poetic notions of transformation with a more removed, academic or less esoteric position.

Carol Bove, “The Oracle” (2010). Courtesy of the Artist and Kimmerich, New York.

CB: I’m interested in critique and seduction — that is certainly part of it. Why bother working with materials you don’t care about? I think my incorporation of hubris is about critique and seduction. For reasons unknown to me I was drawn again and again to Philip Johnson situations. Those explorations were sort of like a flirtation with an older man — I admired him but at the same time found him adorable and ridiculous. The specter of style sounds appealingly sinister, and I’m all for style generally because I don’t consider it a superficial addition to a thing, but more that the outward aspect is expressing the inner meaning. We are both using these evaporated pedestal forms. Mine are all straight rectangular prisms but yours sometimes have more complicated faceting. What are those forms?

SC: The more complex pedestals were a reference to the Pythagorean cult. Comprising twelve facets, they describe a dodecahedron. We naturally assume that mathematics has a bias toward logic and explication, but to the Pythagoreans it was very different. They saw it as unraveling a mystic code for the Divine plan. This newly deduced information was deemed to be so potent and potentially destructive in the wrong hands that certain equations were suppressed and only revealed to initiates. The most powerful of these equations being the dodecahedron. I am interested in pre-ethical/pre-Socratic philosophy for its amazing invention, speculation and compound nature. Having said all of that, the dodecahedron was a concurrent component of the work but not a concluding definition. I was interested in what you were saying about how one can subtly alter a material through our own conception. Subjectivity has a very strong influence over the status of material and visa-versa. That is for me the vacillation between what Heidegger described as the ‘earth’ and the ‘world’ of a thing.

CB: Have you read Moby Dick?

SC: Yes, that book is an inexhaustible mine of material; It’s as diffuse, layered, simple and complex as zoo-plankton, phytoplankton, krill and other unwilling creatures filtering through the baleen plates of a great cetacean. I get bleary eyed just watching Jaws. Anything maritime has a quasi-religious effect on me. As Ian Hamilton Finlay once said, “Who couldn’t love boats?” I think you could genuinely read that book backwards or rearrange the chapters and construe the narrative by smell. How much do you think that your maritime location in Red Hook [a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York] has influenced your work, and to what extent should one allow outside or local influence into a practice?

CB: I really like this question because it’s gotten me thinking about… how to put it? Accepting something suspicious about my artwork. Sometimes I’ve thought that my interest in the ’60s is some version of identity politics, like the worst part of identity politics that would reduce whatever you make to your demographic. It’s confining and deterministic. My living near the water now or my growing up in Berkeley in the ’70s is all part of a larger event. It seems correct that my experience is what my work is going to be made of.

SC: There are a few artists that I have met from an early age through chance encounters, establishing mixed relationships with their work. My wavering opinions have subsequently effected my development as an artist; an experience most artists confront, I’m sure. It goes back to the notion of autobiography in partnership with historical perspective and research. One of these artists, Charles Simonds, I had the pleasure to meet after I curated a show that included a one-off piece. I started to think that perhaps there was some kind of voodoo conspiracy at work with Charles’s work. I would discover Charles Simonds catalogues wherever I went and often in the most unlikely places; sun bleached by the Seine or staring at me in a thrift store or palace. That kind of relationship with an artist’s work could not have developed in a more academic, retrospective way.

CB: Normally you invent objects based on… based on what? For myself I apply this ethos of non-invention, so that what I’m doing with objects is more like framing. Even when I’m inventing, like physically sculpting material into a form that didn’t exist before, I think of it as non-invention because the forms feel familiar. What you are doing is similar, but not exactly the same.

SC: In the second chapter of Guignol’s Band (1944) by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the author casually makes an allusion to an area of London’s East End called Trom, somewhere near Whitechapel. It is a totally fictitious place, an invention. The bell project sprang from a kind of revelry inspired by the heterogeneous nature of the East End of London. Céline describes the constant booming of Big Ben highlighting the underlying violent change inherent in the city. This stirred up my childhood vision of the docklands of London as an endless bombsite. I tried to imagine where Trom might be; Trom for me was and is in the area directly under St. Paul’s Church, Bow Common. The external bell and frame bother me. Exposed like balls peeping from swimming trunks. Semi-secular. Trom bell is a real question mark. I elaborated and stitched the bell into a number of scenarios as an obscure motif for disorientation. The amnesiac bell: autonomous, self-questioning and obsolete. Self-ringing, an alarm clock with no time zone or ritual application, rung by the random events that set up temporary orbit around it. Scoop it up with the rest of the silly signifiers. Melt it down! Make it suffer.

CB: I think I smell the plot! This is your material in/fidelity and your narrative. Atmosphere. Like some fertile substance that can accumulate, like orgone* but sometimes dusty orgone.

SC: At one point we were discussing certain forms of magic that require an appropriated item from the subject of a spell to increase the efficacy. Sometimes these would be treated (Duchamp’s assisted ready-made) or buried under the floor of the unwitting target. What do you think?

CB: I have had some funny experiences that make me think they’re spells.

* Note: ‘Orgone’ is the term used by the late Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich in the late ’30s to describe the energy that permeates all known matter everywhere in every galaxy, the ether to which gravity and magnetism are bound. It is akin to words describing phenomena such as chi, prana, life’s energy or even the Freudian concept of libido.

Carol Bove was born in 1971 in Geneva, Switzerland. She lives and works in New York.

Carol Bove

Carol Bove’s considerable reputation rests upon more than a decade’s worth of refined and culturally literate artworks. Her early sculptural installations, often taking the form of plinths or wall-mounted shelves laden with period books and knick-knacks, evoke memories of 1960s- and ’70s-era bohemianism, and the individual and societal soul-searching that accompanied the period’s wrenching social transformations. That many viewers have no firsthand experience of that historical moment and know it only through publications, films and other cultural objects is part of Bove’s point. Born in 1971 in Geneva, Switzerland, and raised in Berkeley, Calif., she too experienced this cultural ferment at a remove, filtered as it was by the preferences of her parents and their milieu. Because of this, her ability to capture what seems like the essence of the era results as much from an understanding of how we construct history as from a feeling for the lived texture of the time. Her deft juxtapositions-of Playboy centerfold images, paperback copies of Eastern mystical writings and Western psychological treatises-both frame a worldview and reveal the act of framing.

Bove came to New York during the mid-1990s and graduated from New York University in 2000. She began exhibiting immediately thereafter, and her carefully calibrated arrangements of objects were widely acclaimed. In the ensuing years, Bove has broadened the range of materials she works with, the forms her artworks take and the historical antecedents she repurposes. Though “the ’60s” (a time not coterminous with the 1960s) remain a touchstone and one of the period’s emblematic art movements, Minimalism, a preferred esthetic framework, today her art has been drained of much of its cultural specificity. Bringing together materials both luxurious (peacock feathers, gold chains) and rough-hewn (driftwood, steel), Bove has elaborated an esthetic at once unique and capable of rehabilitating artistic precedents that have fallen into disfavor.

The artist works in a large studio a few blocks from the industrial waterfront in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The location is important: she scavenges urban detritus from her immediate environs, and produces work in collaboration with artisans whose machine shops are within walking distance of her building. At present she is working on her first two large-scale outdoor commissions. One sculpture will be exhibited in Kassel, Germany, from June 9 to Sept. 16 as part of Documenta 13, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. The other will be presented later this year at a New York City location that is yet to be announced. The edited transcript of our conversation, which took place at her studio in February, begins in medias res as Bove describes her plans for this latter work.

CAROL BOVE The installation [in New York] will have a platform featuring a totemic sculpture-a huge I-beam with a log attached to it. It’s a 16-million-year-old piece of petrified wood. At first glance it seems like a normal object; it looks like regular wood, so pedestrian as to be almost disappointing. Then, as you touch the material, you discover that in places it’s broken like a rock. You begin to understand what it is.

The platform has another element, my attempt at generic sculpture. I wanted to make something complicated, like tangled spaghetti, out of a material that has a different texture. That part will be made out of tubular steel and appear almost sinuous, though with an awkwardness because I’m making it out of half circles joined together. In a way it’s diametrically opposed to the petrified wood. It’s shiny, hard, smooth, industrially produced; its horizontal orientation balances out the composition as well. I hope that this sculpture will engage the city in both material and temporal registers.

BRIAN SHOLIS What has it been like to scale up your work and, given the unpredictable circumstances of the setting, to build for contingencies?

BOVE It’s totally, totally different from what I’m used to. Most of the time I’m very dependent upon everyone in the exhibition space taking care of the work, ensuring that no one touches things . . . and now I have to think about the work being rained on, or people climbing on it.

SHOLIS Is it difficult to accommodate yourself to that?

BOVE No, it has actually been stimulating to revisit my early experiences of outdoor sculpture, to realize how formative and exciting they were.

SHOLIS In the past you’ve mentioned childhood experiences playing with the Arnaldo Pomodoro sculpture on the Berkeley campus.

BOVE Yes, the sculpture garden at the Berkeley Art Museum was very important to me. It does not exist now-I think because of earthquake concerns. Anyway, later I had the idea that outdoor sculpture was simplistic because of its need to be accessible, and now I’m realizing how wrong I was about that. There is something fascinating about placing out in the world an object with no instrumental purpose, something provocative about the gesture.

SHOLIS How far have you traveled along a path from, on the one hand, artworks that require knowledge of cultural references to, on the other, artworks that are easily accessible?

BOVE In terms of how I conceive of the work’s intellectual contexts, I don’t think there’s a big difference between my gallery shows and my new outdoor projects. In both instances I’m interested in the open-endedness of the situation. In an outdoor environment, especially one used for numerous other purposes, viewers’ initial indifference requires something different of the artist, a novel way to hook people. The benefit, of course, is that viewers don’t come to the work with preconceived ideas of what it should be or do. How can an artist communicate through a public artwork, even on an unconscious level? These are interesting questions to try to answer.

SHOLIS You’ve been conceiving this piece for New York at the same time as you’ve been creating a work for Documenta. Are they going to be on view at the same time?

BOVE That was the original plan; now I think they won’t.

SHOLIS I ask because I think of your exhibitions as exquisite compositions in which each work relates to every other work. Is that how you’re thinking of them here?

BOVE Well, I hadn’t thought explicitly of setting up a circuit between the two sculptures. But I was thinking of them together. The work for Germany will be situated on the grounds of the Orangerie in Kassel and will follow their compositional strategy. Everything there is placed in a line, so what I’m creating will be stiffly in line with another statue that’s already there.

SHOLIS And what kind of elements will it have?

BOVE It will have the same kind of elements [as the New York piece]: a totemic sculpture incorporating petrified wood, as well as another abstract component, this time a network of variously scaled cubes in bronze and steel. I want it to function for viewers at a distance and to have details fascinating enough to hold the attention of someone who has come closer to it. An additional platform I’m creating in this case, however, will stand apart from the rest of the work and have nothing resting on it.

SHOLIS Can you tell me a little bit about the Orangerie?

BOVE The venue is an 18th-century building with extensive grounds. Off to both sides of the main garden are hedged-in spaces I think of as outdoor rooms, in the center of which are statues. One is Apollo and the other is Flora. I wanted Apollo; I felt the Apollonian context would be a nice contrast to some of my works’ elements. But I didn’t get him. I’m OK with Flora, of course. It’s a strange space; it feels kind of metaphysical.

SHOLIS Has this been a rewarding enough experience that you would consider making more outdoor work?

BOVE Yes, it has been great, and I’m really into it. I’m excited by having to work with the viewer indifference I described earlier. I have enjoyed making works that need to be complete in themselves, that don’t need an engaged viewer. It has seemed to me like an opportunity to try and communicate with the unconscious realm.

SHOLIS Can you discuss your relationship to Berkeley, where you grew up?

BOVE There are wonderful hills and parks in Berkeley, but I also always loved the city’s more industrial areas.

SHOLIS Near the water?

BOVE Yes. Even as a teenager, making artworks-my juvenilia, I guess—I was really attracted to industrial districts. I collected rusty junk. Decades later I realized, “Oh, I’m still doing what I did as a teenager.” The use I make of these materials is different but the impulse is consistent.

I have a kind of romantic attraction to liminal spaces. I feel they are underappreciated. They feel wild, and the lack of care for them is attractive to me. Somehow I identify it with 1930s-era Farm Security Administration photographs-shabby America.

SHOLIS So it’s the atmosphere surrounding the materials more than the act of rescuing. You’re not a hoarder?

BOVE [laughs] No, I’m not obsessive-compulsive. I’m not a collector; I don’t like to hold on to things. I spend time with them and then allow them to continue their lives elsewhere.

SHOLIS Though it’s a very carefully thought out path that you set them on.

BOVE Right. For now, at least. But down the road they may end up un-becoming sculpture. I can imagine them losing their sculptural form. In a way, I build for this. My sculptures can and must be taken apart and then put back together. Disaggregation is important. Therefore, each element needs to maintain its individual identity, its autonomy.

SHOLIS The majority of the sculptures you’ve made are, right now, in a disaggregated state. They’re in museum storage or collectors’ storage.

BOVE They are resting [laughs]. They don’t have to be sculpture all the time. The ones that are put together, that are performing . . . well, knowing that they are out there takes some kind of energy out of me, psychic energy.

SHOLIS That’s perfectly understandable. Let’s return to the topic of place, this time Red Hook. Of all the neighborhoods in New York City in which I can imagine you living and working, this one seems the most appropriate. It’s the most weathered, it’s an aging industrial waterfront. Is that important to your practice?

BOVE Yes, totally. Like the Berkeley waterfront, it’s another site of American industrial decline, which fascinates me. The neighborhood is separate from the rest of Brooklyn, divided from it by a highway; it functions as a kind of hideout. I wasn’t looking, but when I found the building in which I now live I immediately thought, “OK, this is my house.” A close friend from Berkeley saw it and said, “You’ve moved back to Berkeley.”

SHOLIS If you moved to another part of New York would your work change?

BOVE Probably. I worry about moving. My materials are so much a part of this particular environment. My processes are also specific to the particular fabricators whose shops are in this neighborhood. I feel very attached to where I am.

SHOLIS Do you adapt your ideas to the skills possessed by the craftsmen you work with?

BOVE Yes, I would say so. It’s not just Red Hook, but New York more generally. I sometimes make sculptures that look like jewelry, and in the jewelry district here you can get any thickness of chain, or get something plated—almost anything I need I can find here. I can also sell my metal scraps and use the money to buy new materials; metals are convertible commodities in New York.

SHOLIS Your process is beginning to sound like managing a series of flows. Materials sometimes literally wash ashore a few blocks away. Some get made into artworks and enter another circuit, and the leftovers are eventually recycled.

BOVE It’s not all movement; there is also a lot of . . . well, marinating. I take in more than I need, and things sit around together for a while.

SHOLIS There’s another side to your work that many people discuss, an aspect that is derived in part from its references to spiritual seekers or guides.

BOVE Perhaps this ties in to what I said earlier about the ability of public artworks to engage a different part of a viewer’s consciousness, because it requires a different kind of attention. Sometimes when people hear the word “psychic” they think “flaky.” I’m interested in means of apprehension that are not necessarily anti-analytic but that are not routed through the intellect.

SHOLIS A prelinguistic understanding?

BOVE Not prelinguistic or anti-linguistic or anti-intellectual. Just nonlinguistic. Sort of like the process my work has undergone in the last few years, moving away from the inclusion of—or direct reference to—printed material. There are still cultural references, but it’s not as easy to discern a particular one.

That shift is in part because I don’t want my work to seem like a research project. One is rewarded for being visually literate and knowing about the culture that this material emerges from, but it’s not a game of figuring out how the different references relate to each other. I prefer the idea of “irresolvability.” I want my works to have a shifting identity.
SHOLIS So the new works are more vague? Though perhaps without the negative connotations associated with that word.

BOVE I want to recuperate vagueness. Sometimes I imagine myself as the first viewer, and I look for elements that cause me to think, “I don’t get that,” or, “That doesn’t do anything for me.”

SHOLIS In past interviews you’ve mentioned the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the I Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, the Kama Sutra. Plus many of the pocket paperbacks in your early work were translations of books on sociology and psychology by European authors. How conscious are you of bringing to bear upon your work an intellectual heritage that isn’t American?

BOVE It’s important, but I’m also interested in the American filter. I feel that you’ve phrased the question as if these were active choices on my part, but the intellectual culture in Berkeley when I was growing up was very international, very assimilationist. Many people living there and then were looking to other cultures for meaning. It can seem now like an impulse to get rid of everything in American culture. Every aspect of American ideology was being reevaluated, although in retrospect I can see how a lot of the dominant culture was reproduced unconsciously.

My first big sculpture show, in 2003, was called “Experiment in Total Freedom.” That was a kind of joke about the era, or at least my experience of it. Adults seemed so permissive: “You can do whatever you want!” As a child, I wondered, “What does that mean?” I feel I actually need a structure in order to do something. There is something kind of limiting about total freedom.

SHOLIS That cultural moment didn’t last long, nor does it continue in many places today. Perhaps it’s not sustainable.

BOVE I hate to generalize about the period, or about the place. I’ll simply say that cultural inquiry of the kind that went on in the Bay Area in the ’60s is a process, and it could still be very exciting. Becoming fully conscious, you know, would be a great thing. It would be great for many people today to engage with that idea.

SHOLIS I want to ask you about the legacy of Surrealism. Do you feel that the ideas about consciousness animating it ever truly broke on these shores?

BOVE In California—Berkeley, San Francisco—there’s a tradition of found-object assemblage, stuff that is almost naively inherited from Surrealists. There was a kind of beat culture, exemplified by Wallace Berman, that seems like Surrealism plus the Kabbalah, which is an interesting formulation. My early experiences with art-making were through that instantiation of Surrealism. I was attracted as a young person to Bruce Conner’s work. If Surrealism did find a home in the U.S., I feel like that’s where it went—to California.

On the other hand, I sometimes wonder whether Surrealism is too silly for us. I don’t mean that dismissively; I love Surrealism. I think there is a lot of it in American art, but people don’t want to call it that because it sounds too silly. We have an aversion to, a squeamishness about, the unseriousness of the unconscious.

SHOLIS I can tell by this long table covered with books and periodicals that you spend time sifting through all manner of visual materials. What else are you looking at lately?

BOVE Right now I’m looking at Plop Art.

SHOLIS Pop Art?

BOVE Plop Art.

SHOLIS To learn how to be a public artist?

BOVE[laughs] Not to learn how to do it—just to see what’s out there. The art world is critical of it, but I’m finding much that fascinates me. Its relative disuse gives it a lot of . . . wilderness.

SHOLIS It’s unsupervised. You can explore it at your own pace.

BOVE I like that. Do you know [George] Gurdjieff? He thought that esoteric knowledge is almost like a material—a material of which there is a finite amount. If you have certain knowledge, you can’t just give it to everyone. If you share it, you are actually parceling it out. But if no one’s paying attention, well, that’s how a sculpture that’s in plain sight could seem like it has a wilderness. For people who do want to give it attention, it can give something back. All the material hasn’t been snatched up. That’s part of what I found interesting about the New York City project.

SHOLIS Do you suspect that people will figure out that part of the work is millions of years old?

BOVE I hope so. It has a lot of . . . energy stored up in it.

SHOLIS Where did you find the petrified wood?

BOVE On the Internet, of course. I went out to Washington State to pick it up.

SHOLIS At some point you decided that it would be OK to use materials that you didn’t happen across on the Brooklyn waterfront, or you didn’t find in a used bookstore. Was that a difficult threshold to cross?

BOVE I was aware of the transition. I had set certain constraints on my activities, and I had to ask, Is there a reason for the constraint? Or does it no longer serve me?

SHOLIS What is the constraint in your studio now, if there is one? Or does your studio practice replicate the freedom and chaos of your childhood in Berkeley?

BOVE I’m sure there are a lot of constraints but maybe there are so many of them that I don’t even know how to articulate them. I started with very rigid ones. At first I was only looking at issues of Playboy published between 1967 and 1972, or something like that. That was it. I couldn’t invent anything. I could photograph them or draw from them but that was it. I started off very confined, and have gradually loosened up.

Brian Sholis is a PhD candidate in the department of history at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center.

Collaborative artist book published on the occasion of Carol Bove’s exhibition, Plants and Mammals, held at the Horticutural Society of New York, 2008. Includes a poster designed by Bove, a 4″ x 5″ c-print of Bove’s sculptural contribution to the show and a fold-out, accordion-style picture book by Janine Lariviere, titled Twentieth Century Narcissus, that chronicles the narcissus cultivars, or daffodil to us laypeople, throughout the twentieth century.

“The photos of flowers in this book have been taken from the gardening catalogs that came to my house between 2002 and 2005. I composed a timeline with the photos according to each flower’s date of origin. By no means is this an exhaustive encyclopedia of the twentieth century’s daffodils. I hoped to have flowers for each year but instead found the flowers in varying concentrations throughout the century.

The daffodil bulb itself is a kind of record. It has the potential to persist indefinitely, blooming again every year. The maintenance of this living library depends on people keeping track of the flowers and choosing to grow them. Current and past tastes, breeding innovations, and the ease of growing, all contribute to determining what remains from the past to present.” – Janine Lariviere

Abandoned Futures: On Carol Bove

October 1, 2013

In September 1967, the artist Robert Smithson boarded the No. 30 bus at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan on a science-fiction journey to his hometown. In his account of the trip, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” Smithson describes a decaying post-industrial landscape where even the equipment for building a new highway looked like “pre-historic creatures trapped in the mud, or, better, extinct machines—mechanical dinosaurs stripped of their skin.” In his day, what is now called the High Line—the park built atop an old elevated railway spur on Manhattan’s West Side—was not yet such a ruin; it was entirely abandoned only in 1980. Since the first section of the High Line opened as a park in 2009, it has been as good an advertisement as any for an outlook that is surely the antithesis of Smithson’s pessimistic vision of a landscape pocked with “monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures.” Such terrain has proven ideal for real estate speculation, with its memory-traces offering a decorative “distressed” context for what might otherwise seem too glossy and boringly upmarket—dull.

The High Line project is not yet finished, and if you want a taste of the spur’s ramshackle grit from the days when only intrepid trespassers found their way onto its forgotten tracks, you can book a guided walking tour of the unfinished portion, which runs above a railyard that at some point is supposed to be occupied by sixteen mixed-use skyscrapers encompassing more than 12 million square feet of space. The topic of the tour is not the High Line itself but rather “Caterpillar,” a group of seven sculptures by the Brooklyn-based artist Carol Bove (on view through May), and the latest installment in the High Line’s ongoing public art program. Three of Bove’s pieces are rectilinear assemblages built of rusted I-beams that look as much like remains from the spur’s old rail machinery—or the flayed dinosaurs of Smithson’s Passaic—as brand-new constructions. A couple of others are, by contrast, snow-white curlicues of powder-coated steel, looking like bits of giant springs that have been partially unsprung. It’s strange to see them sitting amid weeds and rubble.

Whereas the I-beam constructions seem like remains from the past, the curlicues appear to have dropped in from a spiffy future that’s still as desirable as a child’s new toy. A representation of the present, full of plans and halfway built, might be the smallest of the pieces here, Visible Things and Colors (2013). Made of concrete and grids of little brass cubes, it could be a sort of architectural model, a reflection of the obdurate plans and glittering future being fashioned for the area. But another of the works, Monel (2012), might be an admonition against such ambitions, at least if you know its backstory. Essentially a flat slab of bronze, a kind of horizontal monolith, Monel was previously shown at last year’s Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany. Not long after being returned to Bove’s studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn, it was engulfed by the salty floodwaters of Hurricane Sandy, which corroded its glossy surface and introduced an unanticipated patina of decay. For Bove as for Smithson, there are always new ruins in the future; some of them we can learn to live with.

Another seven of Bove’s works are on view at the Museum of Modern Art through January 12 under the title “The Equinox.” Among them are an I-beam structure (Chesed, 2013) and one of the coiled and uncoiled powder-coated steel pieces (although its title, The White Tubular Glyph, 2012, belies the fact that one section of it is actually black); still another is very similar to Visible Things and Colors on the High Line, except that along with brass squares it uses high-density fiberboard, painted white, rather than concrete and feels correspondingly lighter. At MoMA, Bove has put the formal vocabulary of “Caterpillar” in a different context. No weeds here: the seven works are kept immaculate and untouchable on a vast white platform. Nearby, a mass of debris—wood, rusty wire and who knows what else—seems to belong to a different formal idiom altogether. Could it have been retrieved from the unkempt mess of the unrenovated portion of the High Line? Its title is Disgusting Mattress (2012). Maybe it’s another remnant of Sandy’s depredations; in any case, one more souvenir of disaster. The title of another piece at MoMA, Triguna (2012), is a reference to “the three universal qualities (gunas) of all experience in the Ayurvedic tradition: light, darkness, and change,” as the wall text notes. What’s remarkable is the understated way Bove’s art evokes all three.

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Such art might, no doubt, be a little too understated for some tastes. Disgusting Mattress looks like sculpture in the pristine setting of MoMA, but on the High Line it would be just another bit of rubbish. By contrast, the works in powder-coated steel might seem too obviously sculptural in the museum, if not in the weeds. But permeability to its context is essential to Bove’s art. “A sculpture’s unfixed identity is a basic point of entry for me,” she’s said. “An artwork can be repelling for its cheesiness and conservatism and at the same time its elegance will point to the possibility for some kind of heightened experience.” The aspect of Bove’s art that points toward the search for heightened—I might even say transcendent—experience can best be seen at a third New York exhibition of her work. It’s in the West Village at Maccarone, where Bove has a solo show with the riddling title “RA, or Why is an orange like a bell?”, and she has also curated (at a project space around the corner, with Philip Smith) an exhibition called “Qor Corporation: Lionel Ziprin, Harry Smith and the Inner Language of Laminates” (both through October 19). The difference is not so much in Bove’s sculptures themselves; they are similar to the ones at MoMA and the High Line. It’s rather in the context she’s created by placing them in juxtaposition to the work of the cult figures Ziprin and Smith—of whom more shortly.

A word like “transcendent” can set off alarms. It doesn’t sound very critical or rigorous, and it might evoke New Age claptrap. The risk of plunging into some sort of hippie-dippy self-delusion comes with the territory that Bove’s been exploring ever since her sculpture began attracting attention a decade or so ago. Especially in the beginning (and in less overt ways, still today), the matter of her work—its materials and subject matter—has often mined or evoked the 1960s, which for her was the time of “a spontaneous widespread movement to reevaluate culture and to investigate being.”

It was a period of political unrest, but above all of spiritual upheaval. Among Bove’s first works to draw notice were sculptures in the form of shelving units displaying arrays of books and objects. Typical of these is one from 2002–03 called Conversations With Jorge Luis Borges, which takes its name, as you might guess, from one of the approximately twenty paperbacks it includes—some others being George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and D.T. Suzuki’s An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. Some of the books are shelved upright, some have been placed in piles (spine out or bottom out), but two are held open to display black-and-white picture spreads: one showing African sculpture, the other what looks like an encounter-group exercise in which a scrum of people is holding someone up above their heads; the elevated person looks full of joy. Also on the shelves are a metronome and a sort of abstract object made of sticks and string, a kind of arts-and-crafts-class version of Constructivist sculpture (apparently, it illustrates the structural principle that Buckminster Fuller dubbed “tensegrity”). The selection of books is, of course, singular; it could have been the bookshelf in the home of some kid I went to school with, whose parents were much hipper and more worldly than my own. But the piece is not only about the content of the books it contains; it’s also about style and form—how the wood-and-metal shelving unit is as much a product of its time as the books, and how the square configuration of the piece as a whole recalls the back-to-basics aesthetics of the minimalist art of the 1960s.

Could such a sculpture, a Borgesian time machine, be owned by someone whose apartment is filled with books overflowing from shelves and piling up everywhere? I doubt it. Entropy would eventually erase the carefully constructed yet fragile distinction between Bove’s fastidiously arranged books and randomly accumulated new ones, and the old ones might even be read again. For Bove, that’s as it should be. Although her work teems with clever references to the history of modern art, it does not reaffirm the idea of a self-contained and autonomous history of art. Instead, it suggests that the impetus behind changes in art are part and parcel of broader cultural trends.

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Bove no longer makes pieces like Conversations With Jorge Luis Borges, but what has endured is her focus on the intellectual process by which fairly ordinary things can coalesce into a work of art and just as easily splinter apart and return to the quotidian world. As she recently told the critic Brian Sholis, “My sculptures can and must be taken apart and then put back together. Disaggregation is important. Therefore, each element needs to maintain its individual identity, its autonomy.”

Given that she seems to keep lowering the boundary between art and nonart to the point of near indiscernibility, it’s not surprising that the two shows at Maccarone left me wondering if there’s any difference between one person’s art and another’s, between an exhibition of Bove’s work and one she has curated. Although the show on Ziprin and Smith was as informative about those two fascinating and unlikely figures as one could hope—this is not one of those infuriating affairs where the curator calls more attention to herself than to her subject—in some ways it doesn’t seem that different from a Bove exhibition. One reason is that works by Smith, Ziprin, and his wife and constant collaborator Joanne Ziprin, as well as by a little-known West Coast sculptor named Richard Berger, had also crept into Bove’s show at Maccarone. Just as her art can encompass books and knickknacks by others, it can subsume their drawings, paintings and sculptures.

But I took Bove at her word and saw the show on Smith and Ziprin as just what it purports to be: a trawl through the archives meant to cast light on some of the most fascinating and mysterious characters in the American culture of the 1950s and ’60s. Smith is widely known as the compiler of the groundbreaking Anthology of American Folk Music, a collection of then–nearly forgotten music recorded between 1927 and 1932. Sourced entirely from Smith’s own collection of 78 rpm “race” and “hillbilly” records, it was released by Folkways Records as three sets of two LPs each in 1952 and jump-started the nascent folk music revival that came to a peak a decade later with artists like Bob Dylan; it was a harbinger of the re-emergence of what Greil Marcus would later call “the old, weird America.” But Smith was also a pioneering experimental filmmaker who specialized in abstract animations, influenced at first by the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky, as well as a painter and graphic artist, although few of his works in these media survive. And as the child of Theosophists, Smith was an adept of the occult, “the Paracelsus of the Chelsea Hotel.”

For his friend Lionel Ziprin, coming as he did from a line of mystics and renowned rabbis, the supernatural was likewise all in the family. Ziprin thought of himself as a poet, but he seems mainly to have been a nerve center for the bohemia of the Lower East Side, at whose apartment artists, filmmakers and musicians would mingle—Bruce Conner and Jordan Belson, Thelonious Monk and Bob Dylan. Ziprin was a lifelong student of Kabbalah. His wife Joanna was a designer, model and sometime artist; clearly, it was she who had to make sure of the practicalities of life in the family, and so it was she who conceived the idea—how 1950s is this?—that they support themselves by going into the greeting-card business. Thus in 1951, with the intention “to design, perfect and market an idea in greeting cards that we believe in…having to do with imagination, bits of black magic and shoe strings,” they created a company called Ink Weed Arts. It was probably the black magic that doomed the firm, which was sold off three years later, near bankruptcy, only to be succeeded by another similar—and similarly short-lived—venture, the Haunted Inkbottle. Then, in 1958, the Ziprins came across a magical new material just developed by DuPont, called Mylar. They had the idea that decorative designs could be printed on Mylar and laminated to just about anything that could be used for any imaginable purpose. To promote the idea, the Qor Corporation was founded. As one of its veterans recalled, it was “a result of both genius, lots of marijuana, and arrogance.” It just might have worked, but Lionel Ziprin had no intention of actually manufacturing anything that would then have to be sold: “I’m not going to peddle it! I’m not going to sell it on Delancey Street!” He wanted to license his designs to big corporations and collect royalties. He found no takers.

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The Ziprins’ efforts to make it big in business have rightly been called “one of the most curious and wonderfully cracked attempts at merging Beat sensibility with American consumerism.” No wonder an artist like Bove is fascinated by them. That the seemingly most anodyne decorative motifs might nonetheless be impregnated with diagrammatic content of supposedly cosmic significance, such as the Kabbalistic Tree of Life (a favorite of Smith’s) and allusions to materials found in books with titles like An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy, sounds like a scenario from the paranoid fantasies of a Don DeLillo character. It also offers an eccentric parallel to the oft-heard demand that the barriers between art and daily life be dissolved.

Today, as the art world becomes increasingly corporatized, artists (and not only Bove) are finding impossible projects like Ziprin’s and Smith’s more appealing than ever. Where the artists go, the curators follow—and why not, since (as with Bove) the boundary between artmaking and curating has become as porous as the boundary between one person’s present and another’s past. This year’s Venice Biennale, for instance—which I haven’t had a chance to see in person—has thrown its net far beyond the official art world to find, as one observer puts it, “esoteric cosmologies…dark fantasies, enigmatic weirdness, monomaniacal tunnel vision, and much else in like vein.” It sounds like Ziprin and Smith would have fit right in, alongside such historical precursors (and merely unofficial artists) as Carl Gustav Jung, Rudolf Steiner and Roger Caillois.

Not everyone is happy about this. I’m as wary as anyone else of art being swept into some sort of Aquarian la-la land, but consider the supposedly hardheaded alternative on offer: “current artistic endeavors that define art as a social sphere of specialized forms of knowledge and dialogues that are themselves the result of historically specific linguistic and formal interventions within a highly developed system of individual and collective reading competences, incessantly shifting on a spectrum ranging from the mnemonic to the critical.” This is the art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, describing the virtues of the art he thinks was underplayed in the current Biennale. A closed “social sphere” of accredited operators is enough to drive anyone in their right mind to turn on, tune in and drop out of the bureaucratic morass, and start delving into the alternatives. Or better still, like Bove, to search out the uncharted territory where critically sanctioned artistic approaches like minimalism and Conceptualism cross paths with their disinherited Orphic doubles—or at least their memory-traces.

Carol Bove interview

New York-based sculptor Carol Bove makes work that slips effortlessly between the natural and industrial, the found and made, order and chaos. She tells us about experiencing art, bringing colour into her palette, and her love of crushing things

What do you want the viewer to experience in this show?‘In staging the works throughout the space, I want there to be surprises in the way that things unfold: how you’re always looking at one thing through another. There are particular routes suggested and choreographed around the galleries because I want people to think about being in the space. It’s intentional that one of the galleries feels as if you’re barred from entering because it’s kind of crammed with too much work. And I’m completely immersed in thinking about what a sculpture does on and off the plinth. Whatever display strategy you use as an artist will change the perception of the work.’

Why four works in each of the four galleries?
‘That wasn’t something I set out to do but it’s not a coincidence, it’s how things gelled. Four seems elemental and is a cardinal number, but it’s also symmetrical, so it gives the works an awkwardness.’

Is the exhibition designed especially for London?
‘When I started working on the show over three years ago, I thought: what does London need? It needs a forest! Then I thought you should be able to go into the forest and touch it and it will have some sort of sexuality.’

So we can touch the sculptures?
‘That’s where it gets complicated. It’s actually really okay to touch ‘Blindsight’ (2014). It’s made from petrified wood, which is confusing because it looks exactly like wood but it’s stone. There’s this cognitive dissonance to it. Also, you can’t fathom its age: it’s 30 million years old and that pulls you into a different kind of space, to think about something that prefigures humans and history. It’s like a witness in the gallery space.’

But you’ve bolted an I-beam to it!
‘Yeah, I love I-beams. There is something very elegant and awkward about them.’

The works vary from raw to slick textures. Is variety important to you?
‘I want to have a variety of different feeling tones, that’s part of the use of materials. Rusty metal, for example, is really substantial, which is partly about romance and violence. Sometimes, though, it’s totally a slick finish fetish.’

In previous shows you’ve referred to or worked with other creative figures. Why go it alone here?
‘This is an unusual exhibition for me because there’s no other artist or author in it. One of the shaping principals in making this show was not to have any other direct reference points. It partly addresses referentiality in art, which is a habit of our time. When we look at artworks, we have a tendency to see the constitute elements, do a DNA analysis, and say: “It’s part Brancusi and Jeff Koons”. There is a reductionism that happens with that, whereas I’m trying to make things that suggest a different type of viewing that solicits certain types of referential readings, but then frustrates them so they never sit comfortably and get resolved.’

Some of the steel works are colourful. Is that a new development?
‘I wanted to have colour in the show. Sometimes everything is so brown and tasteful, and I wanted something that is tacky and harsher. They also look like what they are, but in a way they don’t. I think they look very spontaneous, soft, and as if they’ve been made in an easy way, which is true. But they’re not soft, they’re pretty thick steel. I have a hydraulic press in the studio that you can just put them into and crank on it to manipulate the form.’

That sounds satisfying.
‘At a certain point last year I thought I wanna start crushing things. Crushing things is really fun!’

==

Critic’s Guide – 04 Apr 2009

Carol Bove

In an ongoing series, frieze asks an artist, curator or writer to list the books that have influenced them

Olof AlexanderssonLiving Water: Viktor Schauberger and the Secrets of Natural Energy (1990)Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) was an inventor, self-taught scientist and fifth-generation forest warden. Through his careful observation of the Austrian wilderness he discovered living qualities in water, ‘the earth’s blood’, and developed technologies using nature’s creative principles. Schauberger started issuing serious warnings of an impending ecological crisis in the 1920s.

I’m not sure if I appreciate this more for its ideas or its tonal qualities. Jameson’s writing is as classical and animate as a photograph by Irving Penn. Some of the more complex sentences require me to stop and ponder for several repetitions, but they also strike me as playful, decorative flourishes.

The Bhagavad Gita (1985)

The manual of practical and spiritual wisdom I keep in my handbag. I didn’t ‘get’ other translations of the book – Easwaran’s commentary is incredibly helpful for a modern, western reader.

Anna BalakianSurrealism: The Road to the Absolute (1970)

I have the growing urge to consider the persistent and largely unacknowledged influence of surrealism since the 1920s and I find it in all sorts of unlikely places. It is the shadow of modernism.

The I Ching or Book of Changes (1950)

This oracle describes every possible situation in the world, reveals them as they emerge and describes how they will develop over time. Jung’s introduction is a link between the ancient book and a modern audience because he asks us to understand its wisdom through The Unconscious. True, the oracle presumes a very foreign political, technological and domestic reality from our own, so in obtaining advice one must apply very creative allegorical readings. Still it was a vibrant instrument from 1950 through the mid 1970s. Its importance as a catalyst for art in the 20th century cannot be calculated.

This completes a suite with the I Ching and Balakian’s Surrealism. I think of the I Ching as a non-living intelligence that sits in the middle of the 20th century: surrealism goes in on one side and is reconfigured by a non-western set of ‘chance operations’. What comes out is a wide array of interconnected artistic practices that all involve Tony Conrad.

American Magus Harry Smith: A Modern Alchemist(1996)

This peerless individual requires more attention!

Wendy Goodman and Hutton WilkinsonTony Duquette (2007)

‘Decorating is not a surface performance, it’s a spiritual impulse, inborn and primordial.’ I imagine the series of objects and settings depicted as a gloss on a parallel art historical narrative. The fantasy that Duquette (1914–99) created is so complete I didn’t notice the whole thing is junk assemblage until I got to pictures from the 1970s. Among many other things, a necklace for the Duchess of Windsor, a playhouse for Liza Minnelli, a portrait of the designer’s beautiful wife by Man Ray and numerous tabletop arrangements called ‘games of chance.’

Herbert MuschampThe Secret History of 2 Columbus Circle (2006)

Desultory, anecdotal and quippy yet epic and authoritative, Muschamp demonstrates how the emergence of gay taste culture in the 1960s corrected modernism’s narrow-minded rigidity, among other things. A forceful case for the importance of audience.

Avant Garde magazine, number 8(1969)

Avant Garde magazine was aligned with the magical-grotesque-naked-psychedelic axis of avant-gardism but its presentation was dynamic and clear, reflecting the partnership of its scandal-attracting editor, Ralph Ginzburg, and its designer, Herb Lubalin. I used to think that number 8, dedicated to the late erotic engravings of Pablo Picasso, was a total waste of an issue but now it’s my favourite one. The nearly square-format pages of uncoated paper are a mix of strong and off colours: black, magenta, process yellow, red, lavender, mineral green, olive, nut brown and buff. The designer took outrageous liberties with the engravings, printing them in contrasting colours, reversals, and multiple scales to produce an exquisite complement to Picasso’s images.

Jay DeFeo and The Rose (2003)

An entire book dedicated to DeFeo’s massive painting, The Rose (1958–66), is good reminder about patience.

Carol Bove’s “RA, or Why is an orange like a bell?” and “Qor Corporation: Lionel Ziprin, Harry Smith and the Inner Language of Laminates”

Riddle me this: Just what is it that continues to make Carol Bove’s focused yet multifaceted sculptural practice so uniquely satisfying?

A simple answer might start with her materials—a carefully calibrated mix of concrete cubes and I-beams, petrified wood and peacock feathers, geometric figures fashioned in delicate brass and powder-coated steel, and well-thumbed paperback books and other esoteric ephemera. These items come together in shelf works, sculptural assemblages, and exhibition tableaux that read equally as modern and ancient, industrial and organic, utopian and brutal, hopeful and melancholic. Then there is the mythology of their origin to consider—either in Bove’s Northern California upbringing or her current life within the post-industrial wilderness of South Brooklyn, where materials like driftwood and desiccated mattresses literally wash up at her feet. (Both of which are part of the artist’s exhibition “The Equinox,” which is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until January 12, 2014.) But there is also something else at work. A productive vagueness animates all of Bove’s work from the last decade or so, meandering between familiarity and enigma while engaging the viewer’s attention at both conscious and subconscious levels.

Those two registers of understanding—the analytic and the intuitive—are pushed toward one another in the pair of exhibitions Bove now has on view at Maccarone. The first is a presentation of the artist’s recent sculptures interspersed with a handful of works by other artists, including Richard Berger’s 1976 sculptural recreation of his Chesterfield sofa made up entirely of lead droplets suspended in mid-air by different lengths of monofilament, a small painting by the versatile Harry Smith, and a vitrine of unattributed visionary drawings from the Lionel Ziprin archive. The exhibition has the puzzling title: “RA, or Why is an orange like a bell?” And, indeed, why is an orange like a bell? As it turns out, this is the question the Riddler poses in the very first episode of the original Batman television series; and it is Robin who ultimately provides the homophonic answer: “because they both must be peeled/pealed.”

In approaching Bove’s sculptures, one can either choose to play the game of peeling back the layers of cultural and formal references to their juicy interiors, or simply let the arcane allusions resonate on their own, filling the space with meditative power. There is no single correct answer, and there are rewards in both methods of engagement. Peel’s foe, not a set animal, laminates a tone of sleep (2013) is a thick pillar of concrete, its top half interrupted by a crystalline lattice of stacked brass cubes that alternately seem to dissolve away or explode into a beautiful, but almost cancerous bloom. The name of the sculpture, meanwhile, offers a bounty of clues in exchange for some casual research. While it plays off the answer to the riddle of the orange and the bell, the work’s title most likely comes from the bizarre, palindromic lyrics on John Greaves and Peter Blegvad’s obscure 1976 concept album Kew. Rhone. In the lyrics and in Bove’s sculpture, “Peel’s Foe” could refer to the fossilized mastodon skeleton excavated in 1801 in New York’s Hudson Valley by Charles Wilson Peale, founder of the first American museum of art and natural history. The imagined (and admittedly anthropomorphic) indignation of Peale’s mastodon at being awoken from slumber in order to serve as a mere set piece points to a possible antagonism within museum culture between the object and its method of display. But it also focuses attention on the nearby Untitled (2013), an awe-inspiring chunk of prehistoric petrified wood affixed like a torso or a totem to an upright steel beam. The massive specimen—reading more like a femur than the trunk of a tree—is a reminder of the pure, almost alchemical transformation that wood undergoes during petrification—when minerals slowly replace organic matter, and only a perfect stone remains.

Elsewhere in the gallery, two sculptures made out of white enameled steel—Solar Feminine and Hieroglyph (both 2013)—counter this metaphysical brew. Like oversized corkscrews, their spiraling forms have been a feature of Bove’s work since her conception of several outdoor commissions, first for Documenta 13 in 2012, and currently for the as-yet-undeveloped Rail Yards section of the High Line in New York. Built from rule-based configurations of half circles and short, straight lines, the sculptures’ forms are elegant (the artist refers to them as “glyphs”), yet also slightly awkward—tendering a human touch to the otherwise limited formulae found in most of the public art one encounters in plazas and parks worldwide. The relational nature of public art also surfaces in the updated display of Flora’s Garden II (2012–13), another sculpture made from I-beams, concrete, and brass boxes that appear to self-replicate. Attacked by vandals while on view in Kassel last year, the bent and broken brass pieces of the work are now laid out on an adjacent platform like Sol LeWitt’s Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (1974).

The second exhibition, which is curated by Bove and the Bay Area rare book dealer Philip Smith, is a straightforward presentation of selections from the archive of Lionel Ziprin—an under-recognized, but hugely influential artistic figure of the New York postwar years—and his Qor Corporation. Ziprin was a prolific poet, bohemian businessman, student of the Kabbalah, and friend to countless artists and musicians. Together with his wife Joanne (herself a brilliantly oddball graphic artist), he led an enclave of like-minded spiritual seekers and creative nonconformists from his apartment-based salon on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Among the Ziprins’ closest cohorts was the artist Harry Smith, who was by then already well-known for his inventive animated films, not to mention his 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, a multi-volume compilation of folk, blues, and country music. Smith was also instrumental within the Qor Corporation, a start-up company that operated from 1958 to 1962 and developed processes for making intricate, reverse-printed designs on Mylar laminates. “Qor Corporation: Lionel Ziprin, Harry Smith and the Inner Language of Laminates” focuses on Smith’s contributions to the enterprise, including his colorful mock-ups for decorated tiles and dozens of drawings and collaborative doodles of the kabbalistic “Tree of Life”—a symbolic, geometric diagram used to describe the flow of creative energy from a Divine Source to its distillation in the material world.

The “Tree of Life” may, in fact, lie at the heart of both of these exhibitions. As a map of the creation of the universe in its macrocosmic form, the symbol’s symmetries and patterns become a source for harmonic compositions on a microcosmic scale—including works of art. There is something undeniably Edenic, whether intentional or not, in Bove’s repeated use of the sculpture garden as a motif and muse for her work. She may have indeed tapped into the energy of a kind of universal abstraction by exploring this prelapsarian state, one that satiates a hunger that generally goes unnoticed until it is by chance fulfilled.

Ginny Kollak is a curator, writer, and editor living in upstate New York.

1View of “Carol Bove: RA, or Why is an orange like a bell?” Maccarone, New York, 2013.

2View of “Carol Bove: RA, or Why is an orange like a bell?” Maccarone, New York, 2013.

In Carol Bove’s studio, there are many rooms. From the windows of the first, one can look out onto the street: garages; asphalt lots; roofs of other buildings much like this one. There is little to draw focus but the Red Hook waterfront is nearby, and many stories about the artist begin with the piece of driftwood or sea foam she picked up on her way here. The natural material comes later though. This first room is the book room.

Piled from edge to edge on a large, rectangular table at the room’s center are Bove’s books: mimeographed poetry magazines, copies of In Orbit by Wright Morris (“In the space of one day, Jubal E. Gainer, high school dropout and draft dodger, manages to rack up an impressive array of crimes…”), C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength and A Power Set Apart by Joseph McHugh, given to Bove by her friend’s father. There are issues of VIEW magazine, the 1940s publication by artist Charles Henri Ford and critic Parker Tyler, one of which contains a black and white collage by Marcel Duchamp.

Bove does not like books that are especially valuable. Many on the table have been selected for her, or at least brought to her attention, by her friend Phillip, a book dealer. “He had never heard of Sol LeWitt,” she tells me, and it is clear that this is a good thing. Phillip’s interest is in poetry and literature. He knows Vito Acconci instead.

“We live with information in a different way from fifteen years ago,” says Bove. “It has become increasingly important to devise a system to place limits on what types and how much information we consume. But it’s a puzzle to design a semi-permeable membrane that allows a variety of different types of information in and isn’t completely predetermined by one’s current expectations. It should allow surprises to enter.”

Books have a place in Bove’s sculptures as both reference and component. She groups them in twos and threes with spines facing out and props them open to image centerfolds on mid-century modern wooden shelves beside other found objects like metronomes or peacock feathers. One such work, The Dyadic Cyclone (2006), is titled after a 1976 book of the same name by neuroscientist, psychoanalyst, philosopher and inventor of the isolation tank, John Cunningham Lilly, and his wife, Antonietta. The book is autobiographical and explores the Lillys’ concern with merging centers — their own, figuratively, and those of two counter-spinning cyclones.

Bove’s Cyclone is a three-tiered shelf bearing several stacked books with one propped open to a double-page picture, taken from the ground beneath two stone high-rise buildings. Pinned to the wall above the shelves is an image of a sphere containing forms in a state of merging. A piece of driftwood on the uppermost shelf sits touching a stack of three books, liberated from the sea but still belonging to the depths — similar in essence to Lilly’s inquiries, which never quite belonged to the conscious mind.

“With artists and authors, I don’t want to colonize their work,” Bove says. “I want to present their work as autonomous statements which remain completely intact. I’m mostly working on the framing and display of things. Of course, by suggesting a context and a possible vector of approach I’m interfering with their meaning and reception so I also want to acknowledge the existence of forced collaboration with these artists.”

“I also want to make space for the viewer. I’m not sure if I can explain it. It has something to do with making things that are extremely obvious — so obvious that I feel that they existed before. When I make something that seems like the articulation of the obvious I feel like I’ve come the closest to making something that doesn’t have anything to do with my individual personality.”

Much has been made of Bove’s interest in the late 60s and early 70s, although “interest” is an understatement: her research into the period is intrepid and ongoing. It has informed much of her work in some way since she graduated from New York University in the late 90s. Bove’s shelf installations challenge a linear hierarchy of meaning: the books and objects are not of this moment but they are still here, being witnessed, and thus have present energy. At the same time, Bove avoids, even criticizes, deification of objects as mascots of history. She questions their status as artifacts, insofar as “artifact” suggests that an object’s truest meaning has expired.

It takes a particular grace to deal with subject matter so recent and yet somehow so overexposed. In Below Your Mind (2004), published in conjunction with Bove’s first international solo exhibition at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Gregory Williams calls Bove’s research an “excavation” — and it is precisely this. Bove invokes insights and ideas from the 60s and 70s that are assumed to have lapsed or lost traction, revealing them as the basis for much of what we claim as “modern.” Her approach is consistent, regardless of whether an idea or action has come to be thought of as wrong or right, a success or a failure.

“I think it’s an inherently interesting time but my continuing interest is probably a result of my own biography, which begins there [in 1971],” says Bove. “The work I made in school was not really related to the work I am making now but… it has had continuity. When I got out of school, thirty years had passed since the late 60s. My belief is that thirty years constitutes a full fashion-cycle. Thirty-year-old stuff looks great and vibrates with relevance and so there was that irresistible draw. Twelve years later, I continue to think of 1969/70 as the aperture where I can enter history but I allow myself much more freedom to move around.”

Where perhaps the first room in Bove’s studio is in service of accumulation — of information, of objects — the second is for distillation. On a tall set of industrial shelves toward the back of the room, dozens of elaborate shells are arranged in an unknowable order. They are from the Philippines and were given to Bove en masse. Their forms are perfect and they have retained their pink, which would not be exceptional but for the fact that these shells are from the 1940s. To one side, lesser specimens are heaped in a wheelbarrow.

Bove approaches nature with a “conservator’s ethic.” When elements from the natural world are utilized in a work, nothing is glued in a way where it cannot be unglued. It is important to Bove that an object appropriated from nature has the right to reassert its autonomy once a sculpture is disassembled. “When the sculpture is not on display the elements are removed,” she says. “Its energetic state is more relaxed when it is off duty. The sculpture is performing with the greatest tension and effort when it is being publicly exhibited.”

The steel structure that elevates the organic matter in Bove’s shell sculptures, for example, elevates each shell as a star if only for a short time. The steel affords potential and the idea of movement, belying its true function — to hold the shells temporarily in place. It is as though, once off-duty as subjects in Bove’s work, the shells have someplace else to be.

One such steel and shell configuration exists in The Foamy Saliva of a Horse, Bove’s installation for the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. Components appeared on a large plinth that spanned the room, somewhere between actors in the wings and models in a presentation, awaiting reception. The plinth also held a flat net hung from a beam and rendered cylindrical by optical illusion; a piece of driftwood suspended from a rectangular brass frame; an outsized piece of rusted metal scrunched like a rejected draft and a log with fixtures attached, stood on its end.

“I’ve been using natural materials in the same way as authored human-made objects since 2005 with increasing regularity,” Bove says. “I think the nature in my work is always nature being observed by a cultured human subject. On the other hand, when we look at art we think what we’re doing is discerning and reading but maybe all of the mental processing to the side of intellect takes up the greater portion of the activity. And it remains unacknowledged, since that part of our experience can’t speak for itself.”

“I’ve been trying to find ways of frustrating ‘the reader’, i.e. the part of the viewer that interprets artworks, while at the same time encouraging reading in an effort to reach a kind of suspended thinking where binaries dissolve, and mutually exclusive positions coexist. I’ve also been thinking about the types of art experience that seem consciously uninteresting or even disgusting that are actually satisfying unconscious needs.”

At the time of my visit, Bove was completing her contribution to Documenta 13, the 100-day art festival that happens every five years in Kassel, Germany. She made four works, collectively titled Flora’s Garden: a large white tubular “glyph,” a low-lying bronze platform, a sculpture consisting of many prefinished brass hexahedrons screwed together to form an asymmetric matrix and a plinth with a piece of petrified wood attached. These pieces are still on exhibition in the gardens of the Orangerie, a former conservatory. The spatial logic of the garden, which is 300 feet long and 30 feet wide, necessitates what Bove terms “a linear encounter” with the work.

Bove has often observed the level of indifference shown to rusted wire or stray organic matter while collecting such material at the waterfront. It is similar, she says, to the level of indifference directed at “generic outdoor sculpture.” The piece of petrified wood in Flora’s Garden is a manifestation of this visible/invisible paradox: it is the perfect cast of a log, the nearest one could get to a piece of “invisible wood,” as Bove describes it: “it’s closer to an image or solid illusion than what it actually is, but it is an illusion making no effort to be an illusion.”

At the end of the hall is one last room. It is the closest thing Bove’s studio has to a control room; it contains Bove’s office, her assistant’s desk and many files. Each work of Bove’s that can be deconstructed, and will therefore necessitate reconstruction, comes with a manual. These manuals are several pages long with instructions and pictures detailing every step of the assembly process. Bove recalls the time when a shelf work was photographed for a catalogue in Germany with a book opened to the wrong page. “The placement is not arbitrary,” she says. “It’s not just ‘ish.’”

“Since people are looking at artwork on the Internet, most people who know my work know it from reproduction,” she says. “The official photo [of a work] takes one moment from its life and confers on it a special status. The official photo makes the assemblages appear to be stable objects, which is not how I think about them. I want to counteract the stabilizing tendency of repeat exposure to these images; the manuals do that.”

“In official photos, the assemblages are reduced to two dimensions and from this one point of view they ‘work’ compositionally. The more successful the documentary images are as photos the more distracting they are, that is, the more they obscure the shifting quality of the three-dimensional sculpture. In real life there are many positions from which the sculptures don’t work. Encountering them in real life you have to search for views. As you move around the sculpture, they keep coming together and falling apart.”

The manuals are made using the default settings of Microsoft Word. They are aesthetically un-arresting, save for the presence of a hand — often Bove’s own hand — that holds parts of a work aloft for pictures. The hand harks back to children’s craft books or instructive art textbooks from the 1970s. The hand proves the sculpture’s dimensionality and immediacy; the work can be held and moved, just like other “normal stuff,” according to Bove.

“The fact of the manual points to the need to take the sculpture apart and reassemble it,” she says. “It also suggests that the sculpture is not attached to one particular form or to one particular moment. Someday, the manuals will develop the air of mystery from an irretrievable time but for now they have none; they are as familiar and unglamorous as .pdf attachments. As a result, the objects they depict are closer to us, in this world and not the romantic world of photography that you can’t have or touch.”

“I think of the sculptures as tactile more than visual. You learn about them through your eyes, but when you see them you think about what it would be like to touch them. The visual aspect provides important clues about how they feel and what they are. The surface of a thing is not simply the most superficial aspect; it proceeds from its interior. The textures have their own intelligences and histories.

This building, like most in Red Hook, is old. Someone occupied it before Bove was making art, even before Bove was born. In the studio’s last room, there is a walk-in safe full of belongings left by a previous tenant over 30 years ago. There are papers and boxes and personal effects, including a fur coat. Bove has not removed these possessions nor has she investigated them especially thoroughly. Somehow, this completes a picture of Bove’s incredible restraint — of her innate understanding of what belongs to when, and which belongs to whom, and at what moments it is necessary to play with these attributions.

“You asked me to tell you about the people I encountered in my research. I can’t remember what I already told you. I spoke with a lot of botanical librarians, also people who worked within the institutions that maintain the records of naming, and some hybridizers and growers, too. Did I tell you about the librarian who had a fresh flower in her gray hair held in place by a paper clip? I doubt I’m conveying to you how magic this all seems to me — that people create flowers and organize them and keep track of their history, their part in civilization.”

This is Janine Lariviere, artist, writing to Bove in a letter titled ‘Garden Flowers’ and dated ‘Spring 2003’. The correspondence is reprinted in Below Your Mind. Pay attention to a single sentence in this text: “I doubt I’m conveying to you how magic this all seems to me.” Consider what it means to discover, and what it means to share. Consider what it means to act with intention, to look at what many have laid eyes on and see something untapped. It is the work of an explorer; a maker; a guardian. It is the work of Carol Bove.

An Interview with Workspace artist Carol BoveWorkspace is an initiative at the Blanton Museum of Art that showcases experimental work by innovative contemporary artists. Currently on view through October 1 at Workspace is New York-based artist Carol Bove’s “setting” for A. Pomodoro, curated by Kelly Baum, the Blanton’s Assistant Curator of American and Contemporary Art. As the title of Bove’s exhibition alludes, the work of Italian artist Arnaldo Pomodoro (b. 1926) figures prominently in the installation. Pomodoro’s sculpture from 1963 is featured in one of two “settings” or “sculpture gardens” created by Bove that narrate moments in the history of twentieth-century art though materials and objects that function as cues. Though not a particularly well-known artist, Pomodoro was active in Italy and California during the sixties and seventies. While he traveled in circles with the Beat poets, Lucio Fontana and Louise Nevelson, his work doesn’t belong to any specific movement or school. Pomodoro complicates a conventional, canonical understanding of art history and, as such, is in keeping with Bove’s own approach, described by Baum as “very personal and idiosyncratic.” Minutes after installing

“setting” for A. Pomodoro, Carol Bove and Kelly Baum met with …might be good’s interviewer Laura Lindenberger to discuss the work, its relationship to histories of the twentieth century and how peacock feathers entered the mix.…might be good: Could we begin by discussing the works themselves – I’d like to have you talk me through them and how they work for you in this space.Carol Bove: I always feel more satisfied if the piece is being imperiled in a way. It activates [the works] to me – there’s a feather here moving a little bit, or this piece looks like it’s almost about to fall off the edge here. It could almost break. To me, that you can have a sense of pathos for something inanimate is really exciting. … At a certain point I realized I wanted you to be able to enter the piece psychologically and I felt like making the shelf at eye level and putting objects in a tableau invited you to enter it psychologically. When I first put the objects on the plane, I thought, these are sort of temporary placeholders for the real thing I was actually going to put there later, which included a whole bunch of other things. I did it sort of unconsciously and then once everything was on there, it didn’t require so much. … I think about the whole piece as being a chronometer, where this plane is a representation of the twentieth century and the continuity of forms from the historical avant-garde moment to more of a neo-avant garde, going from pre-World War I to post-World War II and into the mid-1970s. There are forms that have a life that spans that whole time and it’s not discontinuous. This plane (referring to hanging bronze rods. On March 2, 2006, at 9 p.m., the rods suspended over the “sculpture garden” aligned perfectly with the stars congregating over the ceiling of the Berlin gallery where the work was being exhibited) is happening in the vertical, it’s built in advance of a celestial situation that’s going to come into alignment with the place and the time of the sculpture, so it’s totally contemporary, totally determined by when the exhibition is and where the exhibition is and our time now. But there’s such a built in obsolescence to that too, which makes it pointedly not work after the alignment. Or if it has some relationship to site-specificity, it’s documentary.

…mbg: In the pieces I’ve seen, you have a lot of books lined on shelves and in different configurations. I was interested in how the books become very tactile objects and whether the content of the books plays into the viewer’s experience of the piece. There are no books here, but I think this work plays on some of the same kind of questions because there’s a real tactility to the objects. They’re very sensual and personal. Could we talk a little bit about touch, how you see your viewer interacting with it, and how you interact with the individual elements within the work?

CB: The books I’ve used have been around for a long time, so you have a sense of this life that they bring to the piece that has nothing to do with my authoring it. They have their own life. And they have also relationships to the viewers; a lot of people within an installation would know of a book and would say, ‘Oh, I had that when I was 16’ or ‘That makes me think of my friend who had it.’ … I like using mass-produced books, which are no longer in circulation because they have that quality of having been circulated and having entered the popular consciousness. With this, it’s different because a lot of the patination is really artificial. I would never do that to a book, like scratch it or put it in the oven to look old; I think I prefer things that have their own life and my authoring them seems a little bit withheld. As for the specific materials, I don’t know how people would interact with them. These pieces are really new. Different materials have a lot of content and for me, the concrete cubes were something I started making for sort of a different project. And I thought that scale was exciting and that a lot of the stuff I had been doing is architectural, but more humanized.

…mbg: When everything is taken out of this space, it feels so institutional and you’ve managed to humanize it. I’ve read that many of your spaces become very domestic. It’s interesting to see how you’re transforming the space into something more intimate and personal.

CB: But it’s totally not domestic. I was thinking about the feelings I associate with the university art museum, which are kind of heavy and a little gloomy. Which I don’t mean in a bad way at all. … For me, it’s a really early art experience—that was one of the first art spaces I would go to was the university art museum at Berkeley and it was a really brutalist, concrete building. I just thought, it was such a cheat that that was the kind of architecture you got in the 1970s. My idea of the present and progress and modernism as a little kid was like, in the old days you got something where they actually tried and there was ornament and this is just so ugly. Now that kind of stuff has really grown on me and I really love that building. I wonder if that’s nostalgia or sophistication. I can’t really separate those two things. [The work is made of] really sensual material and it makes me think about that kind of architecture and minimalism but also prison and paving over the world and the kind of violence of modernity. But then also, the scale [of the work] makes it funny.

…mbg: Hearing you talk about this post-war moment or minimalist moment and your own experiences of the museum as a child—what I find really interesting is how these things collapse and how you work as both a collector and an artist. I wonder if you think of yourself as a collector, as an anthropologist of sorts, as an artist/historian?

CB: Basically not. I don’t see myself as a collector because I don’t collect. I accumulate, but then I disperse. I’m engaged with history, but I don’t think of myself that way. It’s not that I’m not disciplined, but the way that I approach it is really different from art historical discipline.

…mbg: It seems more personal, through experience.

CB: It’s really trusting if I just sort of follow my interests and intuition, then I’ll come up with connections that I wouldn’t if I approached it more rationally or more linearly. Sometimes something appears to me that seems so totally irrelevant and I think I’ll follow that, and it prevents me from anticipating what I might find.

…mbg: The Pomodoro sphere is really a beautiful addition to the installation.

CB: I wanted to put the Pomodoro in the middle of the room. It’s like an eye. Kelly was saying something that I didn’t know, which is that he worked after World War II doing rebuilding in Italy. She was comparing his world being destroyed and recreated at the same time, which has something to do with participating in World War II and then being active in the reconstruction. … I think about the different elements—they’re not specific references to anything, but they remind me of things. Like that reminds me of a Giacometti piece and that reminds me of Anne Truitt and this leaning thing is John McCracken a little bit. John McCracken was one of the first people’s work I saw and, you know when you’re a kid and you’re like, ‘I understand that’s supposed to be art, but it’s so simple.’ That really stuck in my head. … With both of these pieces, I feel like there’s a continuity of forms, both of Constructivism over the twentieth century and of Surrealism. The tonal qualities and the feelings of Surrealism are in the lighting. And the forms themselves are more related to Constructivism.

Kelly Baum: When you were describing the peacock feathers, it was so rich and the objects were so saturated with meaning for you and it kind of epitomized the way materials and objects work for you in general—they’re so multifaceted and the stories are like mythology.

CB: You’re right—

KB: It’s like one idea suggests another.

CB: I would never want to have something just be equivalent, like a one to one relationship. It’s always going to be rambling or dispersed. The peacock feathers—I feel like they have all these different points in history where they have a certain moment of interest and I think about classical mythology—they’re the eye of Hera. In the Metamorphosis there’s this beautiful story about Io and Jove. Well it’s a long story, you should read it… In Symbolism, late-nineteenth century, there’s this re-interest in peacock feathers, and in Surrealism they have this understanding of the eye quality. And then in 1966 there’s a big exhibition of Aubrey Beardsley’s work in London and there’s sort of a fashion for him and he’s crazy for peacock feathers, and there’s a revival of the 1890s stuff in the 1960s. But still, in the ‘60s, there’s a survival of the Surrealist forms and then at the same time, in men’s fashion there’s the peacock revolution; men’s fashion got exciting all of a sudden in 1966 and they called it the peacock revolution. Suddenly the males are more interesting than the females. It was widely in the popular vocabulary, the peacock revolution. But then, personally, my grandmother really loved green and blue and she loved peacock feathers. Her whole fashion sense and her sense of culture was really related to classicism and classical culture, but then she was always striving to be modern. But she was so backwards-looking that she was never engaged in a legitimate avant-garde—but she was always striving. And peacock feathers were always arranged in her house in a way for me that was emblematic her forwards/backwards sense of culture. She died recently and so after she died, I became very attracted to peacock feathers.

KB: I have a question about the driftwood—do they have an art historical reference?

CB: I made seats—that was the first part of this project, the seats. It’s hard for me to say what they are exactly. They feel very modern, they also feel very modernist and they also seem like someone specifically and then they also kind of feel like an abandoned pier—the whole thing feels like an abandoned pier to me.

KB: They seem to have lived—all their experiences are recorded. You like materials that have a story and these definitely do.

CB: Making things out of driftwood has this really nice quality because you wonder where it’s been. It could have come from Guam, or maybe from Queens, how long has it been in the water? I live near the water, so I’ll go down pretty much every day and I’ll check out what’s new –

…mbg: Is that where you found these?

CB: Yeah. I’ll have a collection and one piece will be the one that kind of inspires the intervention. I’ll have to think about that—I wonder what they are specifically. I think they’re a little bit of Mark di Suvero. … Arte povera, Pop art, but then also kind of materialist use of found materials too.

KB: The twentieth century is encapsulated in this gallery

CB: Like a kind of gloss on the twentieth century, but a very personal one.

Coconuts at Art PalaceOn view through August 23, 2006

===

An Interview with Carol Bove

Metropolis M Magazine December 2011 / January 2012

CAROL BOVE ON EXHIBITING

Erik Wysocan: I thought I would start with a very brief story about a drunken man who helped to change

my understanding of your work. At the Whitney Biennial in 2008, you had installed

Philip Guston: Painter, 1957 – 1967, which opened in Chelsea at Hauser & Wirth last week, offers a rare, comprehensive peek into one decade in an artist’s process and career.

Curator Paul Schimmel has organized an exhibition of 36 paintings and 53 drawings culled from museums (two from the Museum of Modern Art), a gallery and private collections. The paintings fill all but one of the rooms and feature thick oil or gouache brushstrokes in progressively dim colors that form indeterminate shapes. Guston finally abandoned these types of paintings for the “pure drawings” that hang on the wall of the final room.

Guston’s career progressed from figuration to abstraction and back again. The exhibition’s paintings, as a group, tilt heavily toward abstraction, though murky forms emerge upon close examination. At a preview, Schimmel identified heads, targets, and what could be a paintbrush. “The creation of these forms is really the subject of this entire exhibition,” he said. Guston was concerned with the “loss of the object” in the abstraction that many of his peers were practicing at the time.

“This has been described to me as the transition era,” Schimmel said about the ten years the exhibition explores. It doesn’t really make sense though, he pointed out, that you would describe ten years in a master’s life that way.

“He had an ability to push back on his own history,” said Schimmel. “Push back on his own success. Push back on both the critical and commercial success that he achieved remarkably in the 50s.” It’s a lesson that young artists of any medium can appreciate: continue to challenge yourself, avoid complacency and refuse to allow external praise to guide your career. When Guston eventually left behind his version of abstraction for figurative works that often invoked social issues, many critics were initially appalled. Yet, those works may now be his strongest legacy.

Schimmel spoke about the paintings’ titles as evidence of Guston’s approach to painting as a journey—Traveler III, Turn, Reverse, Path II, Path IV, Alchemist. The names offer small hints for viewers, friendly clues into material that can seem initially unapproachable.

Schimmel also emphasized Guston’s creative challenges. “The word ‘free’ is something that Guston often wrestled with,” he said. “Free was a blank canvas but was ultimately an enormous constraint.” He spoke of Guston’s sense of “unfreedom” as “the freedom of being able to reject and embrace the past. In the beginning, you’re free. When you face the white canvas, you’re free, and it’s the most anguishing state.” It’s a relatable feeling–the simultaneous sense of possibility and fear upon starting a new project, taking all your predecessors into account while attempting to begin something unique and meaningful.

‘I think a painter has two choices: he paints the world or himself. And I think the best painting that’s done here is when he paints himself, and by himself I mean himself in this environment, in this total situation.’
– Philip Guston, 1960

New York… Beginning 26 April 2016, Hauser & Wirth will present ‘Philip Guston: Painter, 1957 – 1967’, exploring a pivotal decade in the career of the preeminent 20th century American artist. Featuring 36 paintings and 53 drawings, many on loan from major museums and private collections, the exhibition draws together a compelling body of work that reveals the artist grappling to reconcile gestural and field painting, figuration and abstraction. Calling attention to a series of works that have not yet been fully appreciated for their true significance in the artist’s development, ‘Philip Guston: Painter, 1957 – 1967’ explores a decade in which Guston confronted aesthetic concerns of the New York School, questioning modes of image making and what it means to paint abstractly. In the number and quality of paintings on view from this period, the show parallels Guston’s important 1966 survey at the Jewish Museum in New York, a half century ago. As its title suggests, the exhibition offers an intimate look at Guston’s unique relationship to painting and the process by which his work evolved.

On view through 29 July 2016, ‘Philip Guston: Painter, 1957 – 1967’ has been organized by Paul Schimmel, Partner and Vice President of Hauser & Wirth. The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive, fully illustrated catalogue focusing specifically on the period beginning in the late 1950s and spanning a decade until the artist’s return to figuration in the late 1960s.

About the Exhibition

By the mid-1950s, Philip Guston (1913 – 1980) and his contemporaries Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still, were among the leading figures of the New York School, standing at the forefront of American avant-garde painting. Guston, whose work was widely exhibited during this period, achieved critical success as an abstract painter, whose work was lauded its luminous, ethereal, and tactile fields of bold gesture and color. At this pinnacle moment, with the artist seemingly at the height of his career, an unexpected shift occurred in Guston’s approach. Dark, ominous forms began to crowd his paintings, coalescing into what would become a new language that consumed his practice over the next ten years.

The exhibition at Hauser & Wirth opens with ‘Fable II’ and ‘Rite’, two small paintings from 1957 that suggest evolution in both Guston’s mood and technique. Disturbing the pictorial field of these canvases, thick, densely clustered black strokes burst through heavily pigmented colorful patches ranging in tone from radiant azure and blazing orange, to fleshy pink and deep forest green. Similarly, a silvery wash of glimmering brushstrokes begins to encroach upon Guston’s lighter forms. Enveloping the background completely in ‘Last Piece’ (1958), the expanses of grey field suggest erasure – an obliteration of the artist’s previous association to pure abstraction.

In that same year of 1958, Guston exclaimed, ‘I do not see why the loss of faith in the known image and symbol in our time should be celebrated as a freedom. It is a loss from which we suffer, and this pathos motivates modern painting and poetry at its heart’. In the face of abstraction, Guston’s search for corporeality intensified. He challenged himself to create and simultaneously dissolve the dialogues of the New York School in a field that evoked ‘something living’ on the surface of his canvas. The introduction of brooding forms can now be understood as harbingers of a new figuration, wherein titles such as ‘Painter’ (1959) go so far as to suggest the pictorial presence of Guston, the painter himself. Wrestling with the simultaneous existence of abstraction and representation, ‘Painter’ strikes a precarious note: ambiguous, but semi-recognizable forms recall the artist’s early figurative works of the 1940s. A red shape and the loose application of blue paint hint at the return of his signature hooded figure, here with a paintbrush in hand. At the same time, however, the artist’s gestures dissolve legible shapes into a swirling field of energies in flux.

The exhibition continues across four dedicated rooms, tracing the evolution of Guston’s forms through the 1960s until they are reduced to “the isolation of the single image”. With such works as ‘Path II’ (1960) and ‘Alchemist’ (1960), dense pictorial dramas are unleashed, with colors and forms competing against one another in a storm of darkened strokes. In ‘Path IV’ (1961), Guston’s blackened, weighted masses emerge victorious, swarming in an atmosphere of rusted reds and ashen greys. Meanwhile, ‘Accord I’ (1962) reconciles the grouping of Guston’s black forms while still offering richness and warmth, as faint hues of color peek through pewter grey grounds.

Such concessions disappear in the following year: In a significant group of works created between 1963 and 1965, Guston interacts directly with the raw surface of his canvas, marking gestural, smoky fields in greys and pinks. One of the largest paintings from this period, ‘The Year’ (1964) is dominated by the presence of two great black personages floating in a field of luscious wet-on-wet strokes. Using white pigment to erase his looming black strokes, Guston creates heaving washes of nuanced grey matter that seem to pulsate with energy and life. As forms become fewer and denser in other works, the artist’s titles imply vague narratives. In ‘Group II’ (1964) or ‘The Three’ (1964), head-like shapes and bodies emerge. In the latter, Guston represents a family: the artist, his daughter, and his wife. The culmination of this extraordinary series is ‘Position I’ (1965), in which a single black shape nestles in a barren landscape devoid of chromatic variation.

In the years following his 1966 Jewish Museum survey, Guston would abandon painting and turn to drawing during a time of internal conflict and personal turmoil. In the two-year span between 1966 and 1967, he produced hundreds of works on paper in charcoal and brush-and-ink that are known as his ‘pure’ drawings. Works from this period occupy the final room of the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth. Presented together in a grid, they recall the manner in which Guston lived with these works, which were tacked to his studio walls.

Commenting upon the decade explored in ‘Philip Guston: Painter, 1957 – 1967’ Paul Schimmel said, ‘If there was one way in which Guston was consistent as an artist, it was in his unwillingness to be pinned down or to rest on his own considerable accomplishments and influence. As one of the most significant proponents in the reconciliation of gestural and field painting, figuration and abstraction, he was a solitary figure, ‘moving vertically’, unencumbered by the responsibilities and pressures that others often felt as they worked in his shadow’.

How Philip Guston, America’s Great Painter of the Night, Completely Reinvented the Sublime

As late as he came to the style, by 1957 Philip Guston was a highly admired first-generation Abstract Expressionist — a phrase he hated. How “late” was Guston? In the 1940s peers like Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko were finding their ways into all-over abstraction. Yet Guston experimented with figures, grounds, solid spaces, and objects until 1950. Pollock — whom Guston went to high school with in Los Angeles (the two were expelled for designing satirical leaflets) and who urged Guston to move to New York in 1935 — had been making abstract paintings since 1939. Gorky had done so since 1932; Rothko and Willem de Kooning reached these further shores by the early 1940s. Guston didn’t go fully abstract until about 1950! History is lucky; had he waited a minute more the Ab Ex train would have left without him and we might never have heard of him.

Guston was always a hesitant plodder, and when he finally did get to real abstraction he stayed ambivalent about it. “Every real painter wants to be, and his greatest desire is to be, a realist,” he said. The abstract works that deservedly won him fame are beautiful shimmering lyrical fields of broken brush strokes, flickering grounds of pearly blue and pink, serene combinations of Monet and Turner with inflections of Mondrian’s early piers-reflected-in-water. But Guston started to feel as if he was only taking small bites. By the 1950s, he felt he “had nowhere to go.” Saying “I hope sometime to get to the point where I’ll have the courage to paint my face … to paint a single form in the middle of the canvas,” he started doing exactly that. And had the courage to do it at the apex of his career.

By 1970 he’d finished “clearing the decks.” From then until his death, in 1980, at 66,* Guston left abstraction behind and made some of the most memorable and influential paintings of the late 20th century, big and small: huge, gloppy, opaque-colored images of Ku Klux Klansmen driving around in convertibles, smoking cigars; cyclopes heads, in bed, staring at bare lightbulbs; piles of legs and shoes; figures hiding under blankets, clutching paintbrushes in bed. A lot of these are so narratively accessible they can seem almost comic-strip-like. But also cryptic. I see spiders, newts, malignant clouds, boatmen, snake charmers, lanterns lighting up existential nights. The list of artists influenced by this incredible work includes Nicole Eisenman, Amy Sillman, Albert Oehlen, Carroll Dunham, Elizabeth Murray, and Georg Baselitz, who saw as early as 1959 that Guston was involved with “a distortion of the abstract … full of concrete forms.” Jasper Johns saw that, too.

But the stakes of abandoning abstraction were high. Recognition had come late to Guston’s generation. The Abstract Expressionists had labored alone in America, dirt poor, with no audience, no art-world apparatus to support them. Only one another. As Barnett Newman famously put it, “We were making it out of ourselves.” And those selves were obsessed with going beyond Picasso and into non-objective painting. They had bet their entire lives on the gamble, which is why any sign of apostasy or disaffection was seen as a threat to all. Even after America took notice of the group, in the early 1950s, they were the constant butt of jokes about “my 3-year-old” being able to paint like that. Worse yet, no sooner had they arrived then a new group of artists — led by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg — arrived on the stage doing totally antithetical work. The world turned on a dime. In 1962, the Sidney Janis Gallery organized a show including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Wayne Thiebaud, and Claes Oldenburg. This was seen as a betrayal by Guston, Robert Motherwell, Rothko, and Adolph Gottlieb, who all quit the gallery in protest. It was the show in which de Kooning reportedly told Warhol he was “a killer of art.” But Guston wasn’t really in line with his colleagues; amidst all this he harbored secret feelings of wanting to change.

By 1957, he’d done everything he could do to avoid doing what he had to do, and his work began to solidify into something new. The lesson of his career is that in order to really be themselves all artists must find their inner Guston: an artist who foregoes easy answers, looks for and channels doubt and not knowing. An artist like this understands that he or she isn’t controlling their art — not really; that on some cosmic level art controls the artist. All great artists must be able to create a machine that can make things that they cannot predict. Even when they make what might be nightmarish or ugly to them.

Philip Guston, Position I, 1965. Photo: Courtesy of Hauser and Wirth

Which is why “Philip Guston; Painter 1957–1967,” at Hauser & Wirth, a showcase of Guston at the turning point of his career, is an incantatory lesson for all artists. Perfectly curated by the gallery’s Paul Schimmel, the exhibition sounds a secret chord for artists in search of one of art’s many strange grails: how to make art that is original and entirely one’s own. This is especially pressing now that there are promising signs of artists everywhere trying to break through the fog of professionalism and careerism that have crept into the art world; the corporate carefulness that’s made too many painters make little moves in known directions; toe pre-approved formal lines; and make the system feel clogged up, static, sterile. Guston, who was desperate to change, knew this. He said “I got sick and tired of all that purity… the extreme codification of beliefs and the institutionalism of everything.” If that sounds painfully familiar, make it your business to see this show.

On view in the airplane-hangar-scaled museum-level gallery show are 35 paintings and 48 drawings. All are from this lesser-known decade of his career, 1957 to 1967. The entire group has not been exhibited together since the 1960s. So this is new information for many in the art world. What we see is a lead-up to what is perhaps the greatest last-act in 20th-century American art history: Guston’s all-hell-broken-loose id-under-pressure late figurative paintings.

The change comes slowly at first; Guston is always fighting it. As Jasper Johns put it about being an artist, “If you avoid everything you can avoid, then you do what you can’t avoid doing, and you do what is helpless, and unavoidable.” Guston did that. The opening gallery shows his first steps — so small you might not see them, thinking, Oh, he’s getting choppier, is all. I guess that triangle could be a hood or something. In 1957, Guston’s colors turn more opaque; warm tones turn frosty and muddy; odd, armlike shapes appear, torsos or trunks, hillocks, shadowy head configurations. But nothing definite. Being figurative was so strictly verboten that at one point Guston said he painted a can with paintbrushes in it, lost his nerve and scraped it off. It was just too much. In the next gallery, Guston’s backgrounds turn blocky. The shimmery thing is gone. So are the little snaky strokes. Things are thickening. A huge maroon hand thing emerges from the top of one canvas. Compositions get optically bolder. In Garden of M, named after his wife and daughter (both named Musa), we spot something like a patchy garden grid, or maybe two lumpy figures clutching each other in bed. Sooty grays, yellows, and crimsons abound. But things stay abstract. What’s happening is that Guston is looking for every way possible not to make a figurative painting. He couldn’t just paint that single thing inside a canvas, a head, or even a can, without retreating back into abstraction. It must have been hellish. These works are almost ugly.

Then, in 1963, he just blows through the fear. A big, black-hat-wearing, egg-shaped head appears with a shaky arm holding what might be a paintbrush and maybe a small canvas. This wasn’t Ab Ex, it wasn’t Pop, it wasn’t like anything. The title Painter III tells us what’s going on; it’s a self-portrait and a collective portrait of all artists’ immense inner temperaments when venturing into realms unknown. But it’s too much for Guston and he pulls back. Again. Looking is just a smooshed figure that might be gazing at a black rectangle. It’s almost self-as-grub. This one-step-forward, one-step-back crab dance continues as Guston looks for biomorphic, architectural, or geometric solutions rather than what’s staring him in the face: the horror of going both figurative and expressionistic. In the last work in the show, Guston hits the wall of all the implied image-making. An all-gray field that is so confusing to Guston he doesn’t even go to the edges, leaving swaths of canvas unpainted. In the middle of this is what looks like a black sun hovering — as if everything that Guston can empty out has been emptied out: except the truth. The implication of figure, ground, narrative, image. He’d reached Johns’s “helpless” place.

Guston must have known the return to figuration couldn’t be denied any more. And still he refused. He was in a battle of wills with his art. It must have been nightmarish. So much so that he stopped painting altogether for three years after the last canvas in this show. He didn’t show his work again until 1970. Critics had slammed that work as “displeasingly raw”; the canvases were said to have “unpleasant texture.” His colleagues were shocked, suspicious, and thought he was trying to hop on the Pop bandwagon; one painter friend asked why he had “to go and ruin everything.” Lee Krasner was said to find the work “embarrassing.” New York Times critic Hilton Kramer lambasted Guston as “a mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum,” dismissing the work as “cartoon anecdotage … funky, clumsy and demotic,” and concluding “We are asked to take seriously his new persona as an urban primitive … and this is asking too much.” But the die was cast. While Pollock was the first to truly break through to pure non-objective painting, it was Guston who was the first to break out. And yet nobody seemed to understand. He’d risked everything and lost.

But Guston had crossed the Rubicon and was becoming the great painter of the American night. Not the night that follows day; the night of self. He said he wasn’t painting “pictures” but “one’s experiences and one’s enlargement of self.” Guston moved the sublime — the bigness of it all — away from abstraction where the Abstract Expressionists located it, away from nature where the 19th century placed it, off the ceilings of churches where it went in the Renaissance, and back, finally, to where it really is and probably has always been since it left the fires in the caves: The sublime is in us!To see that pictured brings Emerson’s “alienated majesty” back to us. Guston helped push everything aside, all the classicizing, romanticizing, philosophizing, or being a theologian of the sublime. This is epic. And it’s in all of Guston’s late work. Of his contemporaries, only the always generous de Kooning saw the real, deep content of Guston’s late art. He said that the subject of this art is “freedom.”

*The original version of this article incorrectly stated that Guston died at age 76. He was 66.

Reflections on Philip Guston
PHILIP GUSTON Painter, 1957 – 1967

One of today’s most influential painters is having his first museum-quality, posthumous show at Hauser & Wirth: Philip Guston: Painter, 1957 – 1967. It’s an exhibition that showcases a transitional decade, a gap that links his earlier, acclaimed abstract expressionist pictures and his later figurative, cartoonish works, which continue to resonate with many important artists of our day, including Dana Schutz, Nicole Eisenman, Amy Sillman, and Katherine Bradford. In the works on view, we see Guston emptying himself. He leaves sumptuous color behind and simplifies his compositions, even temporarily abandoning painting in 1967 to draw. Philip Guston: Painter allows us to focus on the formal: the touch, the color, the composition.

With the knowledge that such moving, significant paintings are around the corner, it is difficult to look at this decade of painting without anticipating what is to come. Guston’s early use of pink, beginning in 1965, will be pushed forward in 1970, the color becoming more corporeal, more atmospheric, and more emotional. He will use it as both the sickly skin color of his figures and the walls behind them. Guston will shape the roughly rectangular, black forms that almost touch in his 1962 painting Untitled into recognizable shapes: shoes, cigarettes, shadows. He will use that same confident, fast, responsive brushwork that is non-referential in this decade to make his figures and their environments. He will tighten the stacking that is just becoming visible in May Sixty-Five or Reverse (both 1965): his paintings will soon feature glasses, people, cars, and shoes resting on tables, beds, streets, and floors.

But what does the viewer lose by understanding these paintings as merely transitional, as I have just done, or by contextualizing them as an attempt to reconcile “gestural and field painting, figuration and abstraction,” as the press release does? This rush to find hints of future paintings, or to triangulate them within different art historical genres, distracts from the painterly elements that create the rhythm and energy that make Guston’s work so exciting, so fresh, so contemporary. Without the striking, psychological, and emotionally resonant images that will come to define Guston’s late work, the formal qualities that make Guston’s work so compelling are easier to discern.

Touch: immediate, direct, responsive. He loads a two-inch brush with paint, and seemingly without hesitation, applies the paint with a consistent pressure to create a dense network of marks. In the earlier abstract paintings, (Rite (1957) and Painter (1959)), Guston nestles his forms close together, creating a claustrophobic, Soutine-like space packed with forms made with tight, impasto brushwork. The paintings are structural and architectural. But in the paintings from 1964 – 65, Guston’s brushwork becomes more open. The brush follows the extension of his arm. It registers the movement of his body.

Color: muted, close contrast. Guston insists that he is not a colorist, as Bonnard was, but a tonal painter, in the vein of Rembrandt, Goya, or Zurbarán. As articulate verbally as he was manually, Guston explained his transition to a more controlled color palette in one of the many wonderful excerpts collected in Hauser & Wirth’s exhibition catalogue:

Gray and black seems magnificent to me. And I guess, also, I want to see how much I can do with very little things. Very simple. Just two colors. I mean, white and black. And a brush. My hand. Nothing to paste on. I want to see if there’s anything left to express with the more elementary means. So far, I’ve found it very challenging and inexhaustible.1

For Guston, reduction of means allowed for expanded communication. In Portrait I (1965), his grays are inflected with the reds and pinks underneath, creating a color that feels less like a wall and more like air.

Composition: variations on a theme, awareness of the edge. Guston’s mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1962 proved crucial for his development. Never satisfied to continue thoughtlessly, Guston visited the Guggenheim every Monday, critiquing the nearly 100 abstract paintings that hung in the rotunda. The museum itself became, as he described, “an extension of my studio.” After the show ended he was “more ruthless” in his practice and began emptying the canvas not just of color, but of structured composition. In The Year (1964), he uses white to “erase” his blacks, creating the grays that surround his black forms, which he saw as objects of a kind. Throughout 1964 – 65, Guston repeated these one, two, or three black forms in slightly different places and in different sizes so that one can see the paintings as a continuum, aided by Hauser & Wirth’s installation. The density of these black forms contrasts with the openness of his edges, which he leaves as unpainted canvas, partly as a practical issue—at this point, he paints on unstretched surfaces—but also as a poetic one. The unpainted edges keep his paintings open and unfussy, allowing for breath. But they also complicate the relationship between image and surface: the painting seems to hover in front of the picture plane, but then an awareness of the unpainted edge locks the painting back in place.

Guston empties the canvas of color and compositional complexity so much that he reverts to drawing; more than fifty ink and charcoal works on paper hang on the final wall of the gallery. As fresh as they were in 1967, these drawings register Guston’s transition back to figuration (he was a WPA muralist in the 1940s). Here we see his recognizable hand: confident (indicated by the pressure he exerts on his material), yet wobbly. We see his openness to images, his humor and playfulness, and ultimately, his willingness to experiment his way forward.

Master Baffler: How Philip Guston Gave Form to Doubt

“Paul Valery once said that a bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning,” Philip Guston told an interviewer in 1966, adding, “In a painting in which this is a room, this is a chair, this is a head, the imagery does not exist — it vanishes into recognition…. I want my work to include more.”

The abstractions on view at Hauser & Wirth contain much more than what we can see. Painted between 1957 and 1967, they culminated two earlier phases of Guston’s life’s work and previewed a final act that would leave many of his contemporaries despairing for him — and later viewers rapturous.

When Guston (1913–80) was about ten years old, his father committed suicide, and it was the youth who discovered the body hanging from a rafter. He reacted by escaping whenever he could into a closet with a single light bulb, spending hours drawing in solitude. His mother enrolled him, at thirteen, in a correspondence course from the Cleveland School of Cartooning, hoping to coax him out of his isolation. A couple of years later, in high school, he became friends with Jackson Pollock, and a teacher introduced the boys to Picasso, de Chirico, and other modernist painters; both students were ornery and were eventually expelled for distributing a leaflet satirizing the school’s elevation of sports over the humanities. By his early twenties Guston had become a skilled muralist, working first in Mexico, then California, and ultimately in New York City, where, at age 26, he won first prize for his mural Work – the American way, painted on the façade of the Works Progress Administration building at the New York World’s Fair.

In 1940 Guston completed another WPA mural, at the Queensbridge housing project, which exudes a hopeful earnestness through the community of musicians, basketball players, workmen, and roughhousing children depicted across its forty-foot expanse. But he was getting fed up with the government program — at one point federal inspectors ordered him down from his scaffold while they investigated the possibility that a dog’s tail curling around a boy’s leg in the Queensbridge mural (a composition inspired by Guston’s intensive study of Renaissance masters) might actually be a camouflaged hammer and sickle. More significantly, he was beginning to chafe against the aesthetic complacency of figuration at a time when his colleagues in the nascent New York School were struggling to find paths to abstraction beyond Picasso’s cubism, Kandinsky’s squiggles, and Mondrian’s geometries.

By the early 1950s, as Pollock was refining the explosiveness of his drip technique, Guston was atomizing his figures into fields of delicately tuned color. In 1966 he told another interviewer, “In the Fifties I entered a very painful period when I’d lost what I had and had nowhere to go. I was in a state of gradual dismantling.” His sense of being caught in limbo is manifested in those early abstractions as crosshatched clumps of color that dissipate into tinted fogs as they spread across a white tract.

In the later works on display here, ranging from two to seven feet across, those scattered clots of pigment have coagulated into forms that gain metaphysical heft from such open-ended titles as Fable II and Rite. With pink, red, orange, and green wedges parrying around black fulcrums, these two paintings (1957) feel as endlessly animated as the waltz of a Calder mobile. Painted with a wet-into-wet vehemence that pushes beyond Guston’s earlier elegance to achieve an earthy gusto, the images refuse to drift into biological allusion or cubist grid. Twinkling humor radiates from the rounded square with depending tail in Traveller III (1959–60), which levitates to the top of the composition like a balloon. Whether it is filled with helium or dialogue is an unanswerable question. In all of these works, Guston’s forms shamble up to the brink of representation (one might flash on the convolutions of the human brain in that scramble of orange and black brushstrokes) but inevitably shear off into abstraction. Narratives gibber behind the thrumming colors, visceral textures, and shifting proportions but never quite cohere. “Doubt itself becomes a form,” Guston told the poet Bill Berkson in 1964, and you can sense in these emphatic shapes the artist searching for a reason to let the classically derived figures he’d abandoned twenty years earlier re-emerge.

Guston mixed much of his color right on the canvas, but the smears here never degrade into mud. Instead, they positively glow. Quick struts of blue or crags of black partially obliterated by squalls of white create translucent layers as luminous as the sun through smoke (a haze that perpetually surrounded Guston, a chain-smoker — it is a rare photograph that doesn’t portray him with either cigarette or brush in hand). “What am I working with?” he once asked the composer Morton Feldman. “It’s only colored dirt.” And while Guston probably wasn’t grandiose enough to equate his own painting with fashioning Adam from dust — or even a golem from clay — he was tireless in trying to make something that had never existed.

That day came with Guston’s startling 1970 exhibition of galumphing cartoon paintings — those comical heads — which was nearly universally panned as willfully retrograde in an age when abstraction was already under assault from minimalism and conceptualism. John Perreault, writing in this newspaper, was one of the few critics to realize the breakthrough he was witnessing, a perspective that would be ratified more confidently by each generation: “It’s as if de Chirico went to bed with a hangover and had a Krazy Kat dream about America falling apart…a lot of people are going to hate these things, these paintings. But not me.”

Perreault was dead-on about the hatred that followed — Feldman and Guston’s friendship was actually destroyed by the cartoon paintings — but that coming pain and revelation was still unknown to the artist when he painted the abstractions in this show. He was working his way to surprising even himself, telling Berkson, “I want to end up with something that will baffle me for some time.”

The Chameleon Painter

Even in his most pared-down paintings, Philip Guston was digging for something new.

June 1, 2016

My wife and I had spent a good bit of time at the opening of “Philip Guston: Painter, 1957–1967,” the current exhibition (through July 29) at the Chelsea-docked starship that is the downtown Manhattan branch of the Hauser & Wirth gallery. Just as we were about to leave, I said, “Wait a minute—let’s not go just yet. I want to see something.” I’d noticed David McKee walking in, and I wanted to get a sense, if I could, of what the exhibition would look like reflected in his eyes.

McKee was Guston’s dealer from 1974 until the painter’s death in 1980, and afterward continued to represent his estate. In 1967, McKee was working at Guston’s previous gallery, Marlborough, just when Guston was producing the extraordinary array of drawings that cap the current show. In an interview for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, McKee explained that when he started working for Marlborough, Guston “was reluctant to have me visit, [saying:] ‘Well, it’s not going to be the sort of work that you’re expecting. My work has shifted.’” When McKee finally did visit the studio, he found it full of drawings of meager, abstract lines, like the ones now at Hauser & Wirth. Stark and powerful for all their obliquity, they seem oddly confident in their reduction of the Abstract Expressionist gesture to nearly zero. McKee saw something similar in the studio of another of Marlborough’s heavy hitters, Robert Motherwell, although his line, by contrast, was “extremely tentative.” McKee realized that both artists “had come to the conclusion that they’d exhausted the possibilities of their fifties and early sixties period. And were now curious about taking their work into other directions…. I never told the other what the other was doing. I couldn’t. It was like a secret that I held.”

Those drawings really were the end of something. When Guston took up painting again in 1968, he was making figurative work for the first time in nearly two decades. He had changed course completely. ( Well, maybe not completely: One of the first of the new figurative paintings, Paw, shows an animal appendage, rather than a human hand, drawing a stark horizontal line that might well be one of those in his 1967 drawings.) Raw and confrontational rather than cool and flashy, the new works showed the influence of comics but not of Pop. Instead of being shiny and new and void of the past, they were populated by Ku Klux Klansmen (a subject that Guston had painted years earlier, as a social realist in the 1930s) and haunting echoes of precursors from Piero della Francesca to Giorgio di Chirico by way of Krazy Kat. Fellow artists at the time responded coldly: They thought Guston had betrayed the cause of abstraction for which they had sacrificed so much. Guston had succeeded in scandalizing not the bourgeoisie, but the self-defined avant-garde. The critics were even crueler: Hilton Kramer’s verdict in The New York Times—that this was the work of “a mandarin masquerading as a stumblebum”—was only the most quotable censure. Guston’s contract with Marlborough was not renewed. Four years later, his new painting show inaugurated the McKee Gallery.

When his gallery shut its doors a year ago, McKee explained: “The art market has grown so vast that our gallery model is in danger: the collector’s private experience with art matters much less, as the social circus of art fairs, auctions, dinners and spectacle grows.” He went on to lament, “The value of art is now perceived as its monetary value. The art world has become a stressful, unhealthy place; its focus on fashion, brands and economics robs it of the great art experience, of connoisseurship and of trust.” For McKee, the epicenter of the new gallery model is Chelsea. In 2009, he remarked that he wouldn’t want “a big gallery in Chelsea” where “the spaces are anonymous, and they’re like cruise ships, where the captain doesn’t really know what’s going on in the ship…. I like a gallery to have a more intimate experience. And you know where if you want to sit and talk with a dealer, you can, who’s not going to kick you out.”

While McKee declined to adapt to the hypertrophy of the 21st-century art market, Hauser & Wirth—a sprawling enterprise with branches in Zurich, Los Angeles, London, and Somerset, England, as well as New York—is among the alpha galleries of the new environment, alongside Gagosian, David Zwirner, and others. Its Chelsea spaces are among the neighborhood’s biggest. The chances of being able to walk in and find Iwan Wirth minding the store and willing to sit down and schmooze about the work with you are close to nil. When McKee walked into the first-ever Guston exhibition in Chelsea (as well as the first with Hauser & Wirth), I was watching him look at art that he knew more intimately than almost any other living soul, and in a context more different than he might ever have expected. The look on his face was that of a man rather stunned—with dismay, or relief, or a little of both, I can’t say. I’d like to think that, without necessarily relinquishing his qualms about what the art business has become over the last 40 years, he was reconciled to seeing Guston in this new light by the evident care and respect with which the exhibition was prepared—no matter if it was installed in one those anonymous white caverns he never wanted for himself.

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It’s often said that mega-galleries mount shows that might once have been the grand projects of museums, and that’s true. The point of an exhibition like “Philip Guston: Painter” isn’t merely to hang works on the wall that happen to be on the market (most of them probably aren’t); instead, the choices are based on serious art-historical considerations. Another such show is taking place nearby at Zwirner, through June 25: “Sigmar Polke: Eine Winterreise,” curated by the former Tate Modern director Vicente Todolí. Like the Guston exhibition, it is not to be missed.

The Guston show really encompasses three distinct stages in his career. Early in the 1950s, his painterly touch was often considered a bit refined compared with some of his more swashbuckling colleagues. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, when this exhibition picks up the story, Guston’s mark starts to look blunter, more declarative; the paintings acquire a greater sense of the “objectness” of things. They are richly colored, with awkward, hard-won forms that clearly exhibit what Guston once called “an infighting in painting itself.” Then, in the mid-’60s, comes a reduction of color to mostly shades of gray, with loose, almost blowsy brushstrokes massing together to form simple, nebulous shapes. Finally come the drawings already mentioned, with their nearly zero-degree mark-making.

The coherence of the Hauser & Wirth show isn’t surprising, given that it was organized by one of America’s most respected curators, Paul Schimmel, the former longtime chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. His involvement reflects yet another aspect of the changes afoot in the art world. In one of those strangely chiastic situations characteristic of the times, MoCA had hired art dealer Jeffrey Deitch as its director in 2010; Deitch and Schimmel didn’t see eye to eye, and two years later Schimmel either resigned or was fired, depending on whom you ask. Deitch himself didn’t last much longer in his new role and is now back running his gallery in New York. Schimmel left the nonprofit world to become a partner at the gallery whose Los Angeles branch is called Hauser Wirth & Schimmel.

For McKee, seeing Guston in this new context must have meant seeing his old friend’s work differently, for better or worse. I saw something almost completely new. That’s because I’d always thought of the essential Guston as the figurative painter of the 1970s. His abstract work was good, I knew, but mainly of interest as the precursor to greater work—an impression confirmed by the only large-scale Guston show I’ve ever had a chance to see, a rather skimpy retrospective at London’s Royal Academy of Art back in 2004. This present show has changed my view: Had the 1967 drawings that form the conclusion to it been the last works Guston ever made—had he retreated into silence, which could well have been the next logical step for him after those defiantly reductive works—we would still have to recognize Guston as one of the great artists of his time.

And yet, however logical—and despite Guston’s friendship with the apostle of silence, John Cage—silence was probably never in the cards for him. Even his most pared-down work was less about shedding the inessential than digging for something new. The search for fresh ingredients meant not only poring through the history of art, but also keeping an eye on younger painters. I don’t think it’s really true that in the late 1950s and ’60s, Guston was—as a gallery wall text claims—“very much removed from the public debate, apart and alone in his studio.” Could those final drawings ever have come into being without him having been aware of a younger artist like Cy Twombly, with his sparse mark-making? A group of paintings from 1964 to ’65, their gray and black lit up by a bit of pink, seems like an attempt to observe how much can be done by varying and redeploying the fewest possible elements, as if he’d been observing the kind of “systemic painting” that had been in the air (and would be the subject of an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1966). In a 1966 interview with Guston, Harold Rosenberg pointed out how the paintings “have a great deal of resemblance to one another. Or let’s say a great deal of thematic continuity. It’s as if your paintings of the last three years were one long”—at which point Guston cuts him off, as if to avoid facing a verdict: One long what?

All the same, despite the seeming suddenness of Guston’s shift to figuration, hints that he was trying to go in that direction (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, trying to avoid an irresistible pull in that direction) are recurrent. They are most evident in the rather awkward work for which the Hauser & Wirth show is titled, Painter III (1963), in which the large central black oval is clearly enough the head of the painter whose brush-wielding hand can be made out just below. Looking (1964) gets its title from the eye-like marks that seem to face the viewer from the head-and-shoulders form on the painting’s right. Reverse (1965) anticipates the head in lost profile (with cigarette and smoke) of Guston’s 1978 Friend-To M.F. ( The composer Morton Feldman was one of the friends whom Guston thought had turned away from him in 1970.) Even earlier works like Fable II and Rite, both from 1957, earn their titles by the nonspecific figurative connotations of their bunched shapes; it would take only a little bit of further manipulation to turn those forms into the kind of stylized figures found in the paintings that Jan Müller was making around this time, or Bob Thompson just a little later. This was the period in which, as Frank O’Hara would write, Guston’s forms “pose, stand indecisively, push each other and declaim.” As early as 1961, the conservative New York Times critic John Canaday was wondering whether “in the end it should prove that he has really gone in a circle, carrying abstract expressionism back to its figurative start.” Just as Guston’s paintings explored the porous boundary between sameness and difference, his career was an essay in the single-mindedness of a chameleon.

In the Abstract

Art | Apr 2016 | BY Katy Diamond Hamer

Philip Guston in his New York City loft, 1957. Photo by Arthur Swoger

What do brushstrokes tell us about a painter? Similar to a written signature, those singular linear marks are unique to each individual, and can change over time. Case in point: a new Philip Guston exhibition at the New York location of Hauser & Wirth, which recently announced its exclusive worldwide representation of the estate of the painter, who died in 1980. The gallery’s premiere Guston show features a series of paintings and drawings dating from 1957 through 1967, a time when the artist was known specifically for his abstraction. Early in his career, Guston made narrative figurative paintings, often working with the WPA on large-scale murals. Then, as Hauser & Wirth Director Anders Bergstrom points out, “In 1950 he started painting completely abstractly and became well known for these works.”

Guston’s Position I, 1965

Curated by Paul Schimmel, “Painter” includes a series of pieces with a limited color palette consisting of earth tones: greys, muted blues, deep reds and greens. The artist moved paint around the surface in a varied yet seemingly specific way. Sometimes it goes to the edge of the work, such as in Fable II from 1957, an oil painting on illustration board. Often it’s possible to recognize the thought process of the artist as he applied his medium thickly by brush, working it with other colors on the piece itself rather than the palette. A few years later, Guston made Traveler III (1959-60), an oil painting on canvas containing a frenetic life energy.

Guston’s Last Piece, 1958

Most of the pieces on view in “Painter” were celebrated in a 1962 exhibition at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. After his death, in 2003, Guston received a major retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum, “but there were only maybe eight paintings that represented 1957 to ’67,” says Bergstrom. “We’re taking those years and blowing it up to 30-plus paintings. People will literally for the first time in 50 years be able to see this many works from that era in one place at one time.”

Guston’s Painter III, 1963

In the 1982 documentary Philip Guston: A Life Lived, he was asked a question about his stylistic evolution between 1962 and 1969. While slightly shrugging his shoulders and lighting a cigarette, he replied, “You work in this style or that style, as if you had a choice in the matter. What you are doing is trying to stay alive and continue and not die.” Guston’s later body of figure-based pieces, once reviled, has influenced a generation. But regarding the abstract paintings currently on view at Hauser & Wirth, the artist stated, “I recognize that they are dissolved and you don’t have figuration, but that’s really besides the point. What is to the point is that I’m in the same state [when making them]. The rest is not my business.”

Seeing David Hammons

Given that the artist is such a spectral presence, how can his multifarious oeuvre be summed up in a single retrospective survey?

September 21, 2016

David Hammons, The Wine Leading the Wine (c. 1969). (Bill Orcutt)

The most passionately discussed New York City gallery exhibition of last season might have been Philip Guston at Hauser & Wirth, but the most talked-about one by a living artist was undoubtedly “David Hammons: Five Decades” at Mnuchin Gallery. Each of the two shows cast its own spell, one very different from the other, but both seemed to offer one emphatic if understated lesson to young artists: Keep your distance from the art world. Guston sought solitude by “painting a lot of other people out of the canvas,” as Harold Rosenberg put it in a conversation with him. Guston concurred: “People represent ideas…. But you have to paint them out. You know, ‘Get out.’” He told Morton Feldman that “by art I don’t mean the art world, I don’t mean lovers of art.” Lovers of art—people like me—might love it to death; what we love in art may not be what the artist needs from it. Guston once compared the art world to a country occupied by a foreign power.

Hammons is even more vehement. For him, not just the art world but art itself is suspect. “I can’t stand art actually. I’ve never, ever liked art,” he told the art historian and curator Kellie Jones in a 1986 interview that remains the most complete exposition we have of this notoriously unforthcoming artist’s philosophy. Claiming to have finally become “too old to run away from this gift,” and fascinated by the “outrageously magical things” that sometimes come of it, Hammons gave in, but without surrendering his reservations. Art should catch you unawares, he told Jones, preferably anywhere but in a gallery: “I like doing stuff better on the street, because the art becomes just one of the objects that’s in the path of your everyday existence. It’s what you move through, and it doesn’t have any seniority over anything else.” In a legendary 1983 performance, Hammons set up a sidewalk vendor’s space on Cooper Square, peddling snowballs that he arranged by size and priced accordingly.

The distance the artist has put between himself and the institutions dedicated to cultivating the appreciative penumbra around art has been not only intellectual but also, so to speak, tactical. He’s famous for making himself scarce. In her contribution to the “Five Decades” catalog, Alanna Heiss—the former director of PS1, where, in 1990–91, the largest exhibition of Hammons’s work appeared, curated by Tom Finkelpearl—­recalls that because the artist “refused to be available by telephone” while the show was being planned, “intricate systems were set up to contact him. The most familiar one I remember was that to meet him, you had to go to the corner of 125th Street by the Orange Julius stand and call a number. He would call you back, and come down and get you. Sometimes it would take a long time. Tom and I had long conversations about the show waiting for David to emerge from the protective cover of the Orange Julius sign.”

Guston and Hammons are hardly the only important artists whose legends are woven around their ambivalence or antagonism to the institutions of art, or rather to art as an institution. An important precursor for Hammons’s brand of found-object assemblage is the great Bruce Conner, whose retrospective, “It’s All True,” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art through October 2. Conner once threatened to “quit the art business entirely,” and while he never quite succeeded, he made it as hard as he could for the art business to deal with his orneriness, which could also take the paradoxical form of pretending not to care. In 1963, he printed a card stating: “The bearer of this card is authorized to alter any collage or assemblage made by Bruce Conner which is displayed for public consumption.”

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Such haughtiness might seem risky to artists coming of age in the social-media era, where accommodation and availability are the minimal conditions for success. Or possibly not, since it’s Guston’s and Hammons’s refusal to assimilate—­and, of course, the eye-opening art that it made possible—that continues to inspire. But who gets to be inspired? Hammons has complained that “the art audience is the worst audience in the world. It’s overly educated, it’s conservative, it’s out to criticize not to understand, and it never has any fun. Why should I spend my time playing to that audience?” The paradox is that, at least for Hammons, dissing the art world turned out to be the best way of winning it over, and his art is no longer a denizen of the street but of the toniest galleries. When Hammons bites the hand that feeds him—and it feeds him very well; he’s one of the top 10 living American artists by auction price, and the piece that scored this record was auctioned not by a collector, but by the artist himself—the response is usually a swoon of pleasure. His first show with L&M Arts, Mnuchin Gallery’s predecessor, in 2007 featured fur coats despoiled with swaths of paint; it didn’t look like much to me, but lots of people waxed lyrical over the sublime nerve of scandalizing the posh uptown crowd by trashing their most precious apparel. No matter that there are always more minks to ranch and foxes to hunt, or that these coats had become even pricier with the swipe of a brush. That’s what counts uptown (and in most other places), isn’t it? So the joke was on whom exactly?

If that 2007 show was a one-liner, Hammons’s second show at what was still L&M, in 2011, was anything but. The artist had never been known as a painter—though I suppose his treatment of the fur coats could be seen, in retrospect, as an unorthodox example of that genre—but this was a painting show unlike any other. The works were big, bold, and brushy in a manner reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism—­or, I should say, so they seemed from what little one could glimpse of them, because they were mostly covered by torn black tarpaulins, plastic garbage bags, and the like. Was this a cruel joke on the market’s preference for painting? Some observers thought so, though given Hammons’s long-standing association with outstanding painters like Ed Clark and Stanley Whitney, that hardly seems likely. In fact, the hybrid three-dimensional constructions that he’d eked out of the dubious amalgamation of relatively traditional artistic means and grubby everyday stuff were nothing short of magnificent. Significantly, Hammons insisted that L&M break with convention by issuing no press release, but the works themselves spoke eloquently enough about how an artist need neither to renounce nor adhere to any aspect of his tradition (including the by-now-traditional rejection of tradition) in order for “outrageously magical things” to happen. With Hammons, they do, more often than not.

Delving even further back into Hammons’s exhibition history gives an even stronger sense of his unpredictability. At a 2002 show at the Ace Gallery in New York, “Concerto in Black and Blue,” the rooms were unlit, shrouded in darkness; visitors were given small blue flashlights so they could make their way through galleries empty of everything but whoever else was passing through. Roberta Smith elo­quently described the experience as “like being surrounded by Arctic fireflies or walking among faintly visible ghosts.” Given that Hammons is such a spectral presence himself, how can his multifarious oeuvre be summed up in a single retrospective survey? What could it mean to look back on five decades of work by someone convinced that being an artist means (as Hammons told Jones) “never liking anything he finds, in a total rage with everything, never settling or sacrificing for anything”?

At Mnuchin last spring, it meant, for one thing, last-minute changes to “Five Decades”—­and more changes made during the course of the show—that were much talked about in the art world. Apparently, Hammons decided as he was hanging the show to exclude some of the works that had already been loaned by important collectors—­an affront in itself—and substitute some small, cheaply framed photographic pieces, many of them documenting some of the more ephemeral works he’s done over the years.

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Is Hammons contrary for the hell of it? It would certainly jibe with his proclaimed admiration, as a younger man, for artists who “were like poets, you know, hated everything walking, mad, evil; wouldn’t talk to people because they didn’t like the way they looked. Outrageously rude to anybody, they didn’t care how much money that person had.” It’s a lot easier to talk that talk when, despite all expectation, you’ve ended up with more money yourself than you probably ever imagined. But still, that attitude is justified only by the art it makes possible and, so to speak, defends. Making bad art to spite an art world primed to accept your every whim as a sign of genius would be the ultimate self-defeating gesture. It’s strange that some of Hammons’s admirers think this is his modus operandi.

There’s no doubt that the great impression left by “Five Decades” came from some of the show-stopping, indelibly strange, sometimes haunting sculptures Hammons has made over the years. I’m thinking of pieces like the 13-and-a-half-foot-high Basketball Chandelier (1997), a pole leaning against a wall and topped with a hollowed-out backboard and rim, the basket itself made of crystal prisms; or the eerily simple In the Hood (1993), a hoodie’s excised hood mounted on the wall and held open by a wire rim, emptily gaping from on high. There are also the recent untitled works—taking off from the paintings of a few years back, a couple of which were also on view—made of big old mirrors draped with torn fabric or blocked with sheets of galvanized steel. These are strangely figurative works: The mirrors become bodies clothed in outlandish, maybe mournful garb, at once scavenged and ceremonial.

But what made the show more than a collection of captured trophies was the selection of small photographic pieces scattered among the larger works. My favorite is from 1989: Untitled (Three Leg Chair), which shows the artist himself (still as elusive as ever in sunglasses) leaning back in an elegant old chair that only has its two back legs. The third leg promised by the piece’s subtitle is Hammons’s own, firmly planted: It’s all about balance, and self-reliance, even when you think there’s an independent support system sustaining you. Other pieces were more mysterious: for instance, a found photo of an all-white basketball team, the ball inscribed with the year “1936.”

That the young athletes’ whiteness seemed so striking in this context probably means I have to use a word I’ve been consciously trying to avoid using. But while Georges Perec managed to write hundreds of pages without using the letter “e”—he failed if you consider his name on the title page of La disparition (in English, A Void) as part of the novel—I’m not virtuoso enough to write a couple of thousand words on Hammons without talking about blackness. That’s unsurprising, considering how deeply race informs his approach, his subject matter, and even his materials (an untitled sculpture from 2004 is a gray stone turned into a kind of portrait head by being topped with hair gathered from a Harlem barbershop). But my reticence, I hope, is just as understandable, because one thing Hammons makes me feel is how much of an outsider I am to his world. That’s not accidental: “White viewers have to look at someone else’s culture in those pieces and see very little of themselves in it,” he told Jones. “And that’s the beauty of looking at art from other cultures, that they’re not mirror reflections.” Is that why he later decided to work with shrouded mirrors?

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If I’m honest with myself, maybe part of the reason I didn’t write about “Five Decades” back when it was on view was that it made me self-conscious about how race and culture condition interpretation. I didn’t feel ready to think through my reactions to the work. And the last thing I wanted was to let myself off the hook by just joining the chorus of praise for Hammons, as if that might make me right with the Lord. What’s more demeaning than joining the laughter at a joke that might be on you?

Luckily, I’ve had another, unexpected chance to delve into Hammons’s art. In Greece this summer, there was a scarcely publicized show of his work on view (through September 30) at the George Economou Collection, a private museum in Marousi, a northern suburb of Athens. (Its owner is a Greek shipping magnate, not the American poet who happens to have the same name.) “David Hammons: Give Me a Moment” is billed as the artist’s first European survey, although it’s a smaller show than “Five Decades”; it even includes a couple of the same or very similar pieces. Ably overseen by Mark Godfrey, a senior curator at the Tate Modern in London, the show’s tighter focus makes it stronger than the one in New York. But whether it’s because of Godfrey’s selection or simply because I was looking at the work in a different context—one in which the specifically American history of racial oppression slips from foreground to background—I saw Hammons’s work differently.

Not that race disappears as a subject. Recalling the 2002 show at Ace Gallery, which was his first encounter with the artist’s work, Godfrey observes: “Readings that try to force Concerto to be a symbol of African American experience are reductive, but to ignore the metaphorical or cultural resonances of darkness, black, and blue would be equally wrong.” In Athens, though, Hammons’s work seemed blessedly indifferent to such dichotomies. Although as sly as ever, it made the artist appear less of a trickster; the characteristic anger of his work was still discernible, but it suddenly seemed less important than the love embodied in it. The overwhelming tenderness in his handling of material corresponds to his feeling about the people whom his art is finally about: black people, in the main, but not only. One of the most touching pieces, inspired by his stay at the American Academy in Rome, is called Roman Homeless (1990). Nothing more than a piece of worn-out, nearly colorless embroidered fabric draped around a cylinder of metal mesh that might or might not be a trash basket, and with some discolored old tennis balls and bits of crystal from a chandelier hanging from one side, the piece is an unforgettable portrait of someone to whom you might give a coin in passing without really noticing—but who, on second thought, could just as well be the soothsayer in Julius Caesar foretelling your Ides of March. There’s something minatory about this eerily faceless head decked out in poverty but also in great ceremony—and yet there’s also the implication that if you had the heart to break the boundary of difference and at last simply see this person face-to-face, the threatening spell might dissipate.

Hammons keeps reminding us that seeing each other is not so easy. At the Economou Collection, there was an untitled work from 1996 consisting of a sequence of African masks—cheap knockoffs, not museum pieces—placed atop one another, bound together with wire and cord: masks masking masks masking other masks, and behind them a blank wall. And just in case you think you can see through them to the underlying reality, at the front of the pile, there’s a little mirror.

Who or what is reflected in the mirror that Hammons holds up to our culture? Keeping in mind what he told Jones about the beauty of an art that can be experienced as not just “mirror reflections,” it might be that the best mirror is an empty one. The mirror that fronts the untitled African-mask sculpture was too high on the wall for me to catch my reflection in. Is that really what the work is offering: an escape from the self, from identity? It wouldn’t be surprising. As abstract as Hammons’s art can be, it is often implicitly figurative, still very much about things—and about how things become magical when you can lose yourself in them. When you work on things, you transform them—the way the rusty, bent bottle caps in Air Jordan (1988) metamorphose into cowrie shells—but they just might transform you at the same time. A change can always come, if you manage to wait long enough.

David Hammons: The Private Public Artist

The staging of Hammons’s work at Mnuchin Gallery amounts to the punch line of a joke that has extended throughout his half-century career.

March 25, 2016

Flying high outside the galleries of the Studio Museum in Harlem and overlooking 125th Street is artist and perennial prankster David Hammons’s most famous work, Untitled (African American Flag), which reimages America’s flag in the Pan-African tricolor of red, green, and black. Whenever Hammons art is included in an exhibition, as the flag recently was at MoMA P.S. 1 during “Greater New York,” viewers are offered an opportunity to renegotiate what can be art. This is the case again in the recently opened solo exhibition, “David Hammons: Five Decades,” at the Mnuchin Gallery through May 27.

“Five Decades” is Hammons’s first survey in about 25 years. In 1990, he presented the solo exhibition “Rousing the Rubble” at MoMA PS1, and since then he has used Mnuchin’s space twice to show “Fur Coats,” in 2007, and “Tarp,” in 2011, with just a handful of authorized offerings in between. The idea for this year’s show started as a museum-worthy retrospective that Hammons whittled down to 33 works, which include a series of never-before-seen photographs. Hammons cut, for example, his clever 1988 portrait (How Ya Like Me Now?) of Jesse Jackson, depicted with white skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes, from the show. The exhibition’s earliest work is the 1969 black-and-white body print Spade(Power for the Spade); it concludes with a vibrant and earthy abstract-expressionist painting wrapped in a tattered red tarp made in 2015.

During a time when museums are dramaticallyexpanding their holdings beyond Eurocentric art, the Hammons exhibition is a tour de force of the art of black life. For the notoriously private artist, this exhibit seems to have presented another opportunity for subversion: Is there a better way to address the hard realities of racism and wag a finger at the institutionalized art world than to present his work in a genteel mansion converted into a gallery between Madison and Park avenues?

The staging of Hammons’s work at Mnuchin amounts to the punch line of the joke that has extended throughout his half-century career. Hammons, who is 72 years old, was born in Springfield, Illinois, to a poor family in 1943. During the early 1960s, in Los Angeles, he studied art and joined an informal group of avant-gardists including Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, and John Outterbridge, of California’s Funk Art Movement. Hammons later became involved in the Black Arts Movement typified by groups like the Chicago-based art collective AfriCOBRA. In 1974, the artist moved to New York City and a Hammons-ian rule emerged: You never know what you are going to get from him, or where you’ll see it. He took over an electronic billboard in Times Square in 1982 to present cryptic messages to the public (harlem can you stand such beauty? one read); in 1983, he sold snowballs alongside street vendors in Cooper Square; in 1986, he covered five 20- to 30-foot-high basketball hoops with bottle caps, an installation, called Higher Goals, that aimed to challenge the imaginations of opportunity-strapped black youth. In 1990, Hammons was awarded the Prix de Rome prize, and in 1991 he won a McArthur “genius” grant. Still, Hammons keeps his distance from the art world as such: He rarely shows, barely grants interviews, and doesn’t have a dealer.

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The conceptual artist challenges the notion of a monolithic blackness in the sculpture that opens “Five Decades,” Which Mike Do You Want to Be Like… ? (2001), which is comprised of three microphones set to different heights. Hammons evokes the physicality and cultural positioning of Mike Tyson, Michael Jackson, and Michael Jordan with humor and word play: three black men who represent dramatically different illustrations of blackness. It also serves as one example, among many in the show, of the ways that Hammons is able to examine the human condition and uncover both trauma and transcendence.

For example, a wooden Bakongo sculpture uses satire to reveal a pause-for-thought truth about modern American society: Hammons painted the double-headed, nail-punctured dog orange and titled it Orange Is The New Black (2014). The Congolese sculpture, traditionally used to ward off evil spirits, makes you wonder who needs to be protected from the haunts—those swept up in mass incarceration or those who make and consume its watered down, pop-culture version.

In the corner of the gallery that Hammons personally arranged sits an untitled 2004 sculpture of a rock with a fantastically fresh fade fashioned from coiled hair swept up off a barbershop floor. The work evokes the ways in which the barbershop—where black boys and men often gather to form community—is, for some, as revered as any American institution. The process by which Hammons, like a barber, finely fixed nappy hair into a celebrated style also serves to question traditional politics of beauty.

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Two mirrors, one shrouded in worn fabric (2013) and the other boarded up with galvanized steel (2014), purposely obstruct reflection. It seems that Hammons wants us to look harder at the conditions that shape black life because the truth is not always easily rendered. And, as with most of Hammons’s art, another message is just under the surface: The joke may be on us.

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On the opening night of “Five Decades” a line of viewers hoping to glimpse Hammons’s art stretched down the north side of East 78th Street. Inside, an assemblage of stars in the contemporary black art world—Thelma Golden, Glenn Ligon, Theaster Gates, Kimberly Drew—gathered to pay homage to Hammons and his work. Hammons was nowhere to be found, as is typical. By now, his absence from the social and commercial spheres of the art world has turned into a kind of performance art itself.

In a 1986 interview, Hammons said, “The art audience is the worst audience in the world. It’s overly educated, it’s conservative, it’s out to criticize not to understand, and it never has any fun. Why should I spend my time playing to that audience?” Thirty years later, the audience continues to show up, but Hammons might be having all the fun.

Laughter and Anger

A David Hammons retrospective.

Views of Hammons’s “A Movable Object / A Japanese Garden,” “In the Hood,” and “Which Mike Do You Want to Be Like . . . ?” Photograph by Raymond Meier for The New Yorker

A concise retrospective—a sampler, really—of important works by David Hammons, at the Mnuchin Gallery, on East Seventy-eighth Street, is a big deal, as Hammons shows generally are. Now seventy-two, the African-American artist has, by choice, exhibited rarely during the five decades of his now-you-see-him, mostly-you-don’t career. When glimpsed in person, he’s a watchful dandy sporting a colorful knit cap, but sightings are few and far between. Hammons so successfully shuns and fascinates the art world that he is almost an art world unto himself. The qualifier “elusive” clings to him. “Unique” applies, too. He is both a satirical oracle of racial fissures in society and a subtle aesthete, in forms of post-minimalist sculpture and installation.

Comedy and spleen seesaw in Hammons’s art. “In the Hood” (1993) is in fact the hood of a black hoodie, hanging agape, high up on a white wall of the gallery. It’s rivetingly clever, but may strike some, at least, as menacing. “Traveling” (2002), a beautifully atmospheric grisaille, nearly ten feet tall, was made by repeatedly bouncing a basketball soiled with “Harlem earth” onto paper. The themes of other works stray from race to class. Purple paint is slathered across the back of a gorgeous fox-fur coat, while two apparently lovely abstractions painted by Hammons are largely concealed by tattered plastic fabrics, reminiscent of homeless encampments. Like earlier Hammons shows, this one feels like a combined diplomatic mission from an ominous polity and a guerrilla raid by a force that departs as swiftly as it pounces.

The artist spoke with me, bracingly and delightfully, for a column in this magazine, in 2002. He wouldn’t do so again. “We hear that he’s in Morocco,” Sukanya Rajaratnam, a partner at Mnuchin, told me. She shrugged: maybe, maybe not. This is Hammons’s third show at the gallery since 2007. The owner, Robert Mnuchin, a collector who was a partner at Goldman Sachs, cheerfully acknowledges that his relations with Hammons are conducted, often by proxy, at the artist’s unpredictable initiative and always under his conditions. It is a tangy arrangement, strictly ad hoc. The works in the show differ from those in the catalogue, because Hammons dropped by the gallery at the last minute and dictated some changes. (“Difficult” is another epithet that trails him, voiced with rueful smiles by dealers and curators.)

Hammons has never had a regular dealer, but he plainly favors the Mnuchin Gallery because it’s at so far a remove from the rough streets that provide most of his material. (It’s in an Upper East Side town house, to which you are admitted by a buzzer through one locked door and by a guard through another.) His first two shows there, of ruined fur coats and shrouded paintings, coolly affronted the wealthy neighborhood, which could roll with it by regarding him as a sort of court jester, licensed by the lofty market value of his work. (Museums and collectors, especially in Europe, crave his sparse output.) He would reject that belittlement, of course, while leaving himself open to it. Paradox becomes him. Andrew Russeth, of artnews, has reported that two years ago Hammons bought a one-story brick building in Yonkers, which the city’s mayor, Mike Spano, announced would be renovated to house an art gallery. The thought of Hammons as a curator excites. Already, he sometimes incorporates other artists’ works into his own shows; for instance, a delicate abstraction by Agnes Martin recently appeared in an otherwise rugged installation in London to enigmatic effect.

Hammons grew up in Springfield, Illinois, the tenth and youngest child of a single mother. He did poorly at school, except in vocational courses. He considered becoming a commercial artist, and, with that goal in mind, in the early sixties he moved to Los Angeles, where he attended, among other schools, the Chouinard Art Institute (later CalArts), a hotbed of avant-gardism. In L.A., he befriended jazz musicians and was caught up in the ripples of the Black Power movement. His first mature works, four of which are in the show, are body prints that he made by greasing and pressing himself and others against paper, applying black pigment, and adding such symbols as American flags and spades from a deck of cards. The best-known of his works include versions of the flag in Africanist red, black, and green and “How Ya Like Me Now?” (1988), a large painting of Jesse Jackson with white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. (None of them appear in this show.)

In 1974, Hammons settled in New York and slowly gained notice for startlingly beautiful sculptures made of empty bottles that had contained cheap fortified wine. For the “Times Square Show,” a well-remembered populist event put on by the artist-activist group Colab, in 1980, he covered the floor of a space with glittering shards of smashed bottles. In the winter of 1983, outside Cooper Union, in the East Village, he staged a legendary performance in which he solemnly peddled snowballs, priced according to size. That jape is memorialized in this show by a glass sculpture of a snowball on a wall-mounted bric-a-brac shelf, and by the printout of an e-mail from a collector couple (their names redacted) who had it in their heads to shop for one of the original snowballs but reported that “not a single insurance company would cover it for us, and we called half a dozen.” For a similar burlesque on the market, “Concerto in Black and Blue,” in 2002, Hammons turned off the lights in the immense windowless Ace Gallery, on Hudson Street, and provided tiny blue key-chain flashlights for visitors. Reinstallations of the work were offered to collectors at prices scaled to the spaces that they wanted darkened.

A recurring theme in Hammons’s work is the seductive and sometimes tragic allure of stardom for impoverished black youth. It is addressed with painful directness in the outdoor sculpture “Higher Goals” (1986), in Brooklyn, which raises basketball hoops twenty or thirty feet in the air. In the Mnuchin show, “Basketball Chandelier” (1997)—a full-sized mockup of a hoop and backboard festooned with dangling crystals—evokes the glamour of the game. “Which Mike Do You Want to Be Like . . . ?” (2001) consists of three standing microphones of different types and vintages. The Mikes alluded to are Jackson, Jordan, and Tyson. On more assertive notes, two sculptures incorporate human hair that Hammons gathered at black barbershops. In a magnificent untitled piece from 1992, borrowed from the Whitney Museum, a vast, stilled explosion of projecting wires is covered with hair. (The piece molts when it is at all disturbed; Hammons maintains a supply of hair to repair it.) In “One Stone Head” (1997), a stone has been given a raffish haircut, suggesting a self-portrait.

More recent pieces in the show include amateur copies or pastiches of African masks and fetish sculptures, which Hammons found or bought and then smeared with orange paint. They are collectively titled “Orange Is the New Black.” Also lately he has extended the motif of his occluded paintings, but without paint, to decoratively framed secondhand mirrors. He fronted one, standing ten and a half feet high, with two sheets of battered galvanized steel. The sheets are angled relative to each other in a way that uncannily recalls classic Cubist or Constructivist composition.

The show has an exquisite soundtrack of traditional Japanese court music, played on koto and bamboo flute. Hammons is enamored of Japan and travels there often. In 2002, he fashioned a faux Zen garden on a flatbed truck and drove it around Yamaguchi. “A Movable Object / A Japanese Garden” (2012) rings a change on that idea with ragged chunks of asphalt heaped on a swatch of lovely blue fabric, by Issey Miyake, and mounted on a wheeled platform. Beautifying asphalt would seem to be no cinch, but the naked quiddity of the stuff, after a third or fourth look, turns cherishable. It’s typical of works by Hammons to repel at first glance and weave a spell on successive viewings.

Hammons’s strategic independence is inescapably self-conscious. It’s a quality he accepts for keeping his several identities—artist, cosmopolitan, American, African-American—in continual play. Infrequently, some of what he does is throwaway slight or arch—take, please, “Standing Room Only” (1996), a taxidermied cat curled up on a West African-style drum—but he is always original and never wanting in point or in purpose. Each piece intervenes in the normal course of art and society, creating a turbulence. He makes people nervous. Some white critics—such as me, when I first encountered his work—have reacted defensively, purporting to roll their eyes at the obviousness of the references and provocations.

But even if you understand a joke it can still be on you. The test is authenticity. The proof of Hammons’s art is his life, and vice-versa. His double-rootedness in demotic culture and in patrician sophistication brackets a social zone that he leaves void, anticipating polarized responses. Whatever you are, at this biting and elegant show, you become the ground zero of the lack and the possibility. ♦

Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic.

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THE VILLAGE VOICE

Looking for Art in the Elsewhere: Fifty Years of David Hammons on View at Mnuchin Gallery

In earlier years, the great David Hammons made work in the streets. “The art becomes just one of the objects that’s in the path of your everyday existence,” he said in an interview with art historian Kellie Jones in 1986. “It’s what you move through, and it doesn’t have seniority over anything else.” In other words, let art interrupt the cityscape, let it steal your attention for even a brief moment, but don’t let the experience of art become rarefied — or let its true values be overshadowed, or bloated, by market ones. “Let me be a bad guy,” he also told Jones, “or attempt to be a bad guy, or play with the bad areas and see what happens.” In 1981, he peed on Richard Serra’s 72-ton T.W.U. sculpture for a work he titled Pissed Off, an act of disrespect in which Hammons wryly marks his own territory for art. (Serra’s piece was also the site of Shoe Tree, for which Hammons lobbed 25 pairs of shoes onto the minimalist’s grand steel structure.) His most infamous performance, Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983), involved him setting himself up next to street vendors on a wintry day in Cooper Square to sell snowballs, priced according to size — art here presented as an absurd, precarious thing.

Inside the impeccable Upper East Side townhouse of the Mnuchin Gallery — where an exhibition of fifty years of Hammons’s art is currently on view — those days feel long gone, though not at all forgotten. Hammons has never stopped creating crucial, critical, potent work. He is, by the estimation of many, one of the most important artists working today. Having mastered conceptual art’s particular detonations, he uses its dissident forces to speak of and to a culture plagued by racism and class struggle. For Hammons, black lives are matter — have always been matter, subject and content for his work. The Mnuchin retrospective is by no means exhaustive — there are just 34 pieces here — but it’s precise, nuanced, and a rare opportunity to witness his art conferring with itself.

Courtesy Mnuchin Gallery/Tom Powel Imaging

Hammons has always used humor to cut many ways at once. His titles can be punny, even corny, twisting the cultural mainstream, rerouting it into slipperier territories, and revealing it to be a double-edged condition. Which Mike do you want to be like…? (2001) is a trio of vintage microphones standing together, unplugged, their cords coiled on the floor next to the stands. Their human analogues are Jackson, Jordan, and Tyson, so the courses of action on offer are to entertain, play ball, or box. Are these the only options? Stepping up to the mic means stepping into the world and assuming the role: The work points to supreme achievement and limited access all at once, Hammons’s mics amplifying nothing but silence in response to the question at hand.

Hammons often sculpts around missing figures — or rather, his sculptures imply figures missing, absent, gone. There’s Champ (1989), an inner tube flayed open, a pair of bright-red boxing gloves taped and tied to rubber strips that dangle like the arms of a fighter defeated, deflated. There’s no body here to fight. High on another wall hangs a hood severed from a sweatshirt, its eerie form keeping shape with the help of wire. Hammons made In the Hood in 1993, almost two decades before the shooting of Trayvon Martin, which pundit Bill O’Reilly notoriously blamed on the teen’s sweatshirt: “I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was.” Hammons has always tapped the multivalence of symbols and their meanings, but in 2016, In the Hood — which also graces the cover of Claudia Rankine’s award-winning poetry collection Citizen: An American Lyric — has become a more pointed emblem.

As installed, certain of Hammons’s works face off with each other. A paint-spattered fur coat hangs on a dress mannequin (Coat, 2007), which is angled toward a ten-foot-tall mirror covered by two sheets of galvanized steel bolted into its frame (Untitled, 2014). No body in the coat, but there’s no reflection to be had anyway. This dynamic repeats between Orange Is the New Black (2014), a two-headed African “fetish object” that’s been painted institutional orange, and a gold mirror draped in swaths of tattered fabric (Untitled, 2013). Hammons’s humor marks the object as “dangerous”: both sharp (nails have been hammered into its body) and felonious (bearing the color of prison jumpsuits). Again, the covered mirror reflects nothing, but who’s to say that a mirror is the clearest way to see oneself or the world anyhow?

Before the show opened, Hammons reportedly changed what the curators had planned, taking some works out and putting others in. He added a score, too: Recordings of traditional Japanese court music played on the koto (stringed instrument) and shakuhachi (flute) have been piped into the gallery, creating a space within a space and further uniting the show into a single world. (He’s long been an admirer of Japanese culture.) Hammons also installed a series of small photographs in inexpensive frames, some of which document works not present, some of which seem to be works on their own. Although they appear incidental at first — afterthoughts, perhaps — what’s notable is how these images are hung in odd places throughout the gallery: high on a wall, in far corners of the room, or down near the baseboards. Against the vivid presence of the other works here, they feel like puncture points, tiny portals into other realms, breaking up the clean sightlines of the otherwise meticulous exhibition space, reminding us to look for art in the elsewheres of the world. After all, what’s in the gallery isn’t all there is to see. David Hammons: Five Decades
Mnuchin Gallery
45 East 78th Street
212-861-0020
mnuchingallery.com
Through May 27

David Hammons is still an anomaly with a gift for turning social absurdities into witticism. Though he has abandoned the perverse (more on this to follow), I wondered what his retrospective, Five Decades—with its blatant ridicule of cultural stereotypes, capitalism, class-resource disparity, and art-world peculiarities—was doing at Mnuchin Gallery in the Upper East Side, a neighborhood that is around eighty percent white and statistically holds more Republicans than most places in Manhattan. Then again, he’s spent his five-decade career sarcastically taunting us with our own predictability.

Hammons first rattled the art world in the 1960s during the height of the controversial Black Arts Movement (BAM), then again by famously (or infamously) pissing on a Richard Serra sculpture, and then again by refusing gallery representation. Today, a survey of the artist’s career confiscates the entirety of Mnuchin’s neoclassical, townhouse-style space. Asian music of undulating tempos ripples and trembles as the show’s backdrop score, where Hammons’s personal photographs are littered around mixed-media works of a broad spectrum. Relieved of the stiffening silences and fluorescent lights of white-box galleries, I moved slightly with the beat.

A lingering affable tenor persists in Hammons’s constructs of satire, puns, and one-liners, ranging from the pensive, to the academic, to the excruciatingly literal. Among the literal is Untitled (Freudian Slip) (1995), a photograph of a beady-eyed alien who’s maneuvered itself up the hem of a sheer pink lingerie slip. Though comparable deadpan works deliver respite from melancholy, they pale before the dominating politically hefty ones, like Untitled (Free Nelson Mandela) (1987), a photograph of Hammons’s Free Nelson Mandela (1987) sculpture that reflects his more brazen art-activism.

Hammons synthesizes object and language, flaunting his humor and politics, sometimes even toying with the contra for a laugh at nefarious sarcasm. Three microphones of herculean proportion, Which Mike do you want to be like…? (2001)—Mike Tyson, Michael Jordan, or Michael Jackson—seems jovial until it resonates as a jab at cyclical poverty and its narrowed escape paths. Likewise, Orange Is The New Black (2014), a rustic orange-painted Nkondi sculpture depicting two dogs nailed together, recalls Piper Kerman’s Netflix series—a humorous, theatrical facsimile of her time in a women’s “minimum security” prison—before the sobering, grim signifiers of America’s orange jumpsuits register. But Hammons persists beyond this slap at the germinating criminal justice system with the added critique, which surfaces from the Congolese Nkondi sculpture’s cultural weight as a symbol of human-to-human vice. Viewing Hammons’s work is never a quick, linear experience; it is more like an archeological dig for the jokes, the homages, and the messages.

Also scattered around Mnuchin’s rooms are unironic criticisms of capitalism and highbrow academia, which seem more palatable for many Upper-East Siders. A prime example of the artist’s satirical parodies on free enterprise is Untitled (Snowball) (1983/2003)—a snow-globe shape with a whitish-gray opaque “snowball” secured atop its wooden base—that recalls the time when Hammons sold actual snowballs on the Bowery as part of his performance piece Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983). Yet Untitled (Snowball) ripens with the framed e-mail exchange between a collector and a dealer, which hangs adjacently: “As much as we would love to own a snowball, not a single insurance company would cover it for us [. . .] And since we are not made of money like SOME people [. . .] we will have to pass.” Evoking art-market capitalism and the commodification of basic resources, classist politics become warped through innuendo.

Moreover, in a recognizable mockery of art criticism, Untitled (Tribal Art) (2007) pictures a 1997 issue of Artforum, which the artist has trophied within a vitrine. This particular Artforum features Ai Weiwei and Marcel Broodthaers; yet with conviction to institutional critique, Hammons has blasted across the cover, “TRIBAL ART,” in thick, red font, above where the original cover reads, “ARE YOU CONFUSED?” He is one of the few artists to fracture the intellectual barriers prescribed by elitist jargon through his exposure of the hyper-intellectual language that preserves the art-world’s exclusive terrain. Only a handful of artists have so deliberately challenged those who hold market leverage, notwithstanding the historic scope of “political” artists and their propaganda work surrounding feminism, war, civil rights, among much more.

Within Hammons’s broad body of work, Five Decades is a collective reminder that “life is a cosmic joke and humankind is incorrigible.”1 The show alleges that art, class, race, education, and the entirety of American society is politicized, a notion of particular substance as we recognize that the civic weight of Hammons’s motifs have synonymously prevailed since the ’60s. But inklings of optimism nest within the disassociation between Hammons’s work and Mnuchin Gallery; if artist and gallery can collectively revise orthodoxies, perhaps there is prospect for demolishing the cultural, educational, and class-structure barriers that have disenfranchised many groups of individuals from the arts.

Hammons has visited Mnuchin unannounced on a handful of occasions to make changes to Five Decades and its configurations—adding, removing, and shuffling works, even eliminating text labels for ones written directly on the white walls. A head-shaped rock, Untitled (2004), topped with afro-textured hair, was substituted for a head-shaped rock of a different fade called Untitled (One Stone Head) (1997). About three weeks before closing, Hammons pragmatically swapped Untitled (Snowball) for a glass of water (e-mail remaining). New photographs were added while some were awkwardly moved to look like they’d fallen off the wall. The space seemed to progressively empty, as if we were witnessing capacious dilapidation over a small two-month window. Most importantly, Hammons has personalized our experiences of the show: those who only visited once are oblivious; those who saw it more than once strain to harmonize its changes with one’s own memory; and art critics scramble to revise “facts” that are no longer factual.

Endnotes

Irving Sandler, Swept Up By Art: An Art Critic in the Post-Avant-Garde Era, (Brooklyn, New York: Rail Editions, 2015), 44.

Contributor

Alexandra FowleAlexandra Fowle is a Senior Production Assistant at the Brooklyn Rail.

Among the many brilliant and confounding works in David Hammons’s current retrospective is one entitled A Movable Object/A Japanese Garden (2012). The piece centers around a wheeled flatbed dolly, a perfectly banal machine bearing strange cargo: chunks of broken asphalt interspersed with unrecognizable articles of clothing and lengths of colorful tulle. Facing this apparent enigma, the mind grasps after established meanings. It registers familiar qualities like texture, color, and density. It tries to establish contrasts between the jagged opacity of the asphalt and the smooth translucency of the fabric. It asks questions: what is being said here about color, about blackness, about materiality or meaning?

Searching for cues, the viewer’s eye finds a warning sticker on the dolly’s side: DO NOT RIDE OR OVERLOAD. In an elliptical manner that is typical of Hammons, this caption reads as a wry, sardonic joke. Of course the “movable object” can’t be ridden, it’s an artwork. And not only is the dolly loaded with hundreds of pounds of asphalt; the sculpture seems to be overloaded with potential meanings, not all of which resolve or align. There’s a gnomic levity to this humor but also an air of faintly hostile warning: the joke’s on the person who doesn’t get the piece, or the one who makes too much of it.

For those unfamiliar with Hammons’s work, A Movable Object encapsulates the singular aesthetic of this irreplaceable artist, which stages unexpected encounters between elegance and abjection, poise and brutality, mocking laughter and dead seriousness. Recombining objects with complex affiliations to race, class, and the lived spaces of the American city, Hammons exacerbates frictions between their obdurate materiality and their function as signifiers. The resultant effect resembles what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, in a text on black aesthetics, term “a dialectic of luxuriant withholding”: an intricate, unstable interplay between a proliferation of possible meanings and the refusal to signify as expected.(1)

Withholding has of course long been a part of Hammons’s public persona; the artist shuns interviews, rarely appears in public, and produces relatively little. This controlled scarcity has not only boosted the artist’s reputation, but has also inflated the value of his work, stoking the desire of collectors who jostle for position on his dealers’ waiting lists. Partly because Hammons lets his art speak for itself—but also because it has received inexplicably little serious study—it has been subject to certain misconceptions, like the idea that the artist positions himself as a trickster figure like those of West African folklore.(2) Such readings, even if well intentioned, are too easily complicit with a racialized neo-primitivism—a problem that Hammons has countered by détourning masks and power figures, and by adorning the cover of Artforum with the slogan “TRIBAL ART.”

By assembling many of Hammons’s sculptures, prints, and paintings, the exhibition offers a valuable opportunity to complicate these received views. Whether it constitutes a satisfactory retrospective is up for debate. Despite the breadth of the selection, even a spacious gallery like Mnuchin can’t offer the comprehensive sweep that a major museum can—but hasn’t, and should, and soon. There’s also the fact that Hammons insisted on rehanging the show shortly before it opened, removing multiple works and inserting ten cheaply framed photos of on-site installations dating back to the early 1980s. (This gesture nodded toward the curatorial agency Triple Candie, which cleverly organized an unauthorized Hammons retrospective, composed entirely of photocopies of existing reproductions and documentation, in its Harlem exhibition space in 2006.)

These images highlight a crucial dimension of Hammons’s production, one which the exhibition otherwise largely ignores: his execution of sculptural interventions and guerrilla performances during the decades of New York City’s transformation from a deindustrializing dystopia to a neoliberal showcase. As signaled in his two pivotal engagements with Richard Serra’s sculpture T.W.U. (1980–81)—in Shoe Tree (1981) Hammons tossed pairs of sneakers over its top, while in Pissed Off (1981) he urinated against its side—Hammons amplified the critical potential of site-specificity while deflating its monumental aspirations. In subsequent pieces like the justly celebrated Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983), but also the equally strong Delta Spirit House (1985), Higher Goals (1986), and Four Beats to the Bar (1990), he confronts non-art audiences with sharp but cryptic references toward gentrification, financialization, and the gendered racialization of urban space.

Throughout such work, as in his oeuvre more generally, Hammons has consistently rearticulated the relation between race, sense, and materiality. In Spade (Power for the Spade) (1969), a print made by applying margarine to his own person, he uses the black body simultaneously as material, instrument, signifier, and subject. As the self-contradictory title suggests, the piece collides starkly opposed signs; in one image we see the Afro and raised fist of Black Power and the prominent nose and lips of racist caricature. Instead of cancelling each other out, these markers portray blackness as a kind of double bind, in which any attempt to resignify racial identity is inevitably also determined by its structural, symbolic, and extra-subjective status. One can’t unilaterally seize or speak the truth of blackness, but neither can one deny it, especially as it governs vulnerability to different modes of violence.

This complex, nuanced position informs Hammons’s persistent use of racialized materials like black hair, “Harlem earth,” fried chicken, and dark pigment. While such a stance made him an outlier during the 1970s at the peak of the comparatively essentialist Black Arts Movement, it makes him look unbelievably prescient from a more recent perspective, when figures like Thelma Golden and Darby English have called for a non-identitarian aesthetic that decouples black artists from restrictive expectations. A similarly prophetic force is evident in the 1993 sculpture In the Hood, which uses a slashed hoodie as a disembodied portrait of ghettoized black masculinity, and which was taken up as a popular avatar for Black Lives Matter activists in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder. It testifies to the power and complexity of such work that it can function effectively as a thumbnail-sized denunciation of racist state violence, and moreover that it can do so without losing its aesthetic and conceptual impact.

Overall, the Mnuchin show succeeds primarily in reminding us that much more remains to be thought and said about Hammons. We need to know more about his engagement with Japanese culture, which is alluded to but not elaborated. Closer attention should be paid to the way he interleaves race with masculinity and with class, as in Champ (1989), which splices together references to Muhammad Ali, menial labor, and detumescence. And little has been said about Hammons’s recent turn from “poor” materials like Night Train wine bottles to “rich” ones like fur coats, or about how these are combined in his tarp paintings, which layer construction netting over large abstractions.

Such gestures read somewhat awkwardly in a posh blue-chip gallery on the Upper East Side. Even as Hammons skewers the privilege and market-dictated tastes of a wealthy, presumably largely white audience, he also indulges them, as if trying to have it both ways. It is more encouraging to learn, as was recently announced, that Hammons has purchased a building in the nearby city of Yonkers with the intention of turning it into a gallery. Nothing is known yet about his plans. This is of course not surprising; it is also fitting, and tantalizing, and a reminder to keep paying close attention to him.

A Review of David Hammons’ “Five Decades – A Look at Iconic Contemporary Art”

In an age of technology and social media, the art world has kept interest and excitement with new exhibits by iconic talent. Installation and performance artist David Hammons new exhibit at the Mnuchin Gallery brings the his work back for a full collection for spring 2016. The collection of work is the first career survey for Hammons in 25 years. The midwest-born artist with a Los Angeles background, unveiled his most recent works with the collection and added Japanese music as an added touch to the viewing. Hammons was also heavily involved in arranging the show.

The work unveiled at Mnuchin, located on the upper east side of New York City, is full of statement art pieces that express the emotions of musical art, the realism of graffiti art and even some modern day expressions which includes the use of color.

As a lover of all styles of art, I had a chance to see the collection and look at the pieces with an open eye. I was able to make some interpretations as to what I thought the artists may be trying to say. There were some pieces that took more thought, while a few of them may be designed with the elite art lover in mind, too in-depth for a basic art viewer to understand. This may have been the goal of David Hammons.

David Hammons work spans nearly 50 years, hence the name “Five Decades” While the art tends to lean toward black power and urban movements across the decades of his work, there is a difference in his most recent work and his iconic work from decades earlier. In this review I divided his most recent works from his iconic works.

Most Recent Works

2015 – Hammons 2015 work includes an untitled piece- a canvas with mixed colors and red acrylic draping. The look of it is modern, in line with many contemporary artists. Looking at the huge splash of red gives the thought of blood and possibly symbolism of the struggle in America for unity among its people.

2014 – Another untitled piece in the collection – A long glass mirror covered in boards. It gives the look of an abandoned home where the original architecture is being preserved from damage. Lovers of Pre-war properties and architecture will easily gravitate to the sculptured edges around the glass mirror.

Orange is the New Black – This work of art – created in 2014, is the namesake of the popular Netflix digital series. The statue is made of wood, nails, glass and acrylic. It reminds me of a modern spin on classic Tibet or Aztec art styles.

2012: Hammon’s “A Movable Work” is my least favorite of all of his collections. It does not look creative. It appears to be a pile of brick at a construction site. There may be deeper meaning here. But it was difficult for me to grasp.

2001 – “Which Mike do you want to be like ….?” This clever piece is simply made out of three performance microphones. The piece was created at the end of the Michael Jordan basketball era. It’s a play on Nike’s “Be Like Mike” ads. The three different mics have unique character and can be compared to life, personality and of course art.

Iconic Work Before 2001

Through partnerships with organizations and under his own leadership, Hammons created earlier works with specific thoughts and meanings, while leaving the art open for interpretation.

1997 – “Basketball Chandelier”– This piece is the mixture of interior design and sports. A traditional basketball hoop was transformed into a chandelier fit for a formal dining room. One might look at this work and think Hammons was fusing the two to convey the value of basketball in urban society.

1988 – “How Ya Like Me Now?” This piece takes a political stance with graffiti writing on a photo of a blonde blue eyed man near an American Flag. Many conclusions can be drawn from this work.

1970 – “Sexy Sue” This work is a woman wearing dark glasses draped in a fashionable floral material. The piece was created at the end of the flower child era and into the more powerful statements and freedom exuded in the 1970’s.

Overall, I think the David Hammons exhibit holds the interest of viewers and is worth the visit. It is definitely a conversation starter for a date night or a group of art enthusiasts. My only dislike is the lack of titles among his most recent works. It leaves the viewer of the art slightly confused since the need to grab for a meaning is important to those who love art and are not creators of it.

Whether you love or hate the art in David Hammons’ Five Decades, it is something to see and discuss.

This substantial survey encompasses almost fifty works from the start of David Hammons’ career in the late 1960s, through 2015. The show’s cumulative impact should remove any doubt that David Hammons is America’s leading Dadaist. The Dada project chronicled the breakdown of Western European society to effectively create meaning through its cultural structures, especially language and art. If Dada was nihilistic, it was simply reflecting the fundamental nihilism of Western culture. David Hammons makes use of Dadaist interventions —performance, puns, and readymades —to shows how nihilism expresses itself in this country. America’s “peculiar institution” laid the foundations for a symbolic system in which the affirmation of personhood relied on the denial of the humanity of African slaves and their descendants. Hammons’ strategy of engaging with the African-American experience through irony, outrage and a sly playfulness, has become a surgical tool, a scalpel, so to say, that cuts deeply into the attitude of white America. It cuts to the psychic carcinoma of a cultural mindset that to this day cannot validate itself except in denying the right of the Other to exist. Far from being nihilistic, Hammons affirms the power of political engagement. His practice, including his deliberate disregard for art world market norms, points to a moral center lacking in the general population.

The cutting edge of Hammons’ scalpel is a tactical choice to manipulate symbolic systems that altogether excludes notions of “whiteness.” A photograph, Obama Shrine —16th Century —Obama, Japan 2012, (2012), clearly puns on the name of our first African-American president, whose tenure has kicked a hornet’s next of xenophobia, rage, and revanchism. The double irony is that the shrine exists in Japan, a country whose history also excludes notions of white exceptionalism. In the run up to WWII, Japan justified its militarization with an ultra-nationalism based on the racial superiority of the Japanese, with disastrous results for its neighbors. Denied its military ambitions, after the war, the Japanese “economic miracle” led it to become among the most culturally and technologically advanced nations in the world. Typical of much of his work, Hammons’ goal in the Obama piece are twofold: one, to present to non-whites, and especially African-Americans, a narrative where their input is essential; and, two, to present to whites a situation where they are symbolically invisible —a historical experience all too familiar to people of color in this country.

Hammons flatly rejects the invisibility of blackness in American culture. His earliest pieces in the show consist of actual body prints, in which Hammons would coat himself or a subject in margarine and make an imprint on a piece of paper, which he would then coat with pigment. After making the imprint, he would often add symbolic details. Untitled (Man with Flag), (undated), features the face and handprints of a black man holding an American flag draped like bunting. Hammons clearly says here black folks have a central position in the American narrative, given, among other reasons, their role in American history’s most traumatic event, the Civil War.

While this survey show does not do justice to Hammons’ performances, such as Phat Free, (1995/99), it does demonstrate his command of the readymade. The sardonically titled A Movable Object / A Japanese Garden, (2012), consists of an orange construction dolly loaded with great big hunks of torn-up macadam. The piece possesses a strange poetry, even beauty, which speaks to New York City’s perpetual rebuilding. Japanese rock gardens are intended as contemplative objects to bring to mind nature and the impermanence of all things. The impermanence at issue here appears to be entire neighborhoods, notably Harlem, the historic heart of black culture, which are falling into the devouring maw of the city’s insatiable real estate market. The ground of these neighborhoods is literally being ripped out from under the inhabitants.

Hammons’ career has dignified, with a genuine sense of moral urgency, a set of practices, notably readymades and performance, which have been at risk of falling into academic irrelevance ever since they became staples of the art school industrial complex. To do so, Hammons has, partly through necessity, and no doubt through inclination as well, decided to be in the art world, but not of it. His actions, including turning down interviews, and flouting art market conventions, as he did for this show by substituting work at the last minute, offer emerging artists a clear alternative to submitting to the frenzy of the market. In that regard, this survey of his art makes a strong case that he is not only American’s leading Dadaist, but also one of our most important artists, period.
—HOVEY BROCK

Review – 17 Sep 2016

David Hammons

by Paul Teasdale

Mnuchin Gallery, New York & The George Economou Collection, Athens

Both surprise and disappointment accompanied news that two major David Hammons exhibitions were to open this spring and summer. Surprise because the famously reclusive artist was going to have two comprehensive solo shows in quick succession; disappointment because, if true to form, as someone who has always bucked the expectations of
the art world’s circadian rhythms, this would mean another long hiatus between exhibitions. That these two shows were some 5,000 miles apart – one in the opulent townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that is home to Mnuchin Gallery, the other in shipping magnate George Economou’s space on the outskirts of Athens – was also not unproblematic. That anyone wanting to see both would have to travel so far, at no mean expense, seems a tribulation the artist – who once labelled art goers ‘the worst audience in the world’ – might quietly enjoy. After all, Hammons has long made it his mission to puncture the presumptions and comfortable privilege of a still largely white, affluent art world. Geographical breadth aside, these shows mark a significant moment for the artist, who is now 73: a two-part global retrospective of sorts, comprising the largest sustained exhibition of the artist’s work from the past half century. Seeing Hammons’s work en masse gives them a new urgency at a time when social tension over wealth inequality and race relations in the US has seemed as close to boiling point as it has been for 25 years.

Despite the timespan covered by the exhibitions, each figured a teasingly curt selection of works – more greatest hits than anthology. Both open with the performance-begetting arrangement of three microphones, Which Mike do you want to be like …? (2001), referring to those three demigods of black sporting and musical fame: Jackson, Jordon and Tyson. At The Economou, curator Mark Godfrey went for the slam dunk with two more signature works in the opening gallery: a basketball hoop with a car windshield as backboard (Untitled, 1989) and the Stars and Stripes recoloured in Marcus Garvey’s red, black and green (African American Flag, 1990).

It was in the early 1970s that Hammons’s body prints – made by coating himself (and others) in grease, pressing the flesh against paper and adding black pigment – catapulted the artist into the limelight of the New York art scene. A few of these feature across the shows, with The Wine Leading the Wine (c.1969) at the Economou probably his best example, and Spade (Power for the Spade) (1969) at Mnuchin not far behind. Both display an insatiable appetite for confronting the slurs and stereotypes aimed at the black community with a biting wit.

Yet, the means of Hammons’s critique is always varied enough to catch you off balance. A restless dexterity with materials characterizes his output: take, for example, the totemic sculptures made of stone and hair swept from black barbershops in the artist’s neighbourhood of Harlem, which appear in both shows; or the dreadlocked figure made from tyre inner tubes (Rubber Dread, 1989); or the repurposed African tribal-mask assemblages Hammons extends outwards from the wall in a Marinetti-esque pastiche of
a black ancestral history (Untitled, 1996). Hammons is never one to leave a pun on the shelf, and both shows include versions of his famous In the Hood (1993), a cut out hoodie hanging from a wall, which references that garment’s association with petty crime in low-income neighbourhoods, and its role in racial profiling.

Though predominantly sculptural, a performative element underlies Hammons’s work. On Mnuchin’s first floor, stubbed cigarettes littering and puncturing a fine fabric screen and a glistening chandeliered basketball hoop are the ghosts of actions: one of which did take place (the artist smoking); the other that could never happen (a pick-up game in the gallery). See, too, the glass snowball commemorating Bliz-aard Ball Sale – the artist’s famous 1983 performance on Cooper Square, where he sold snowballs priced by size – and an accompanying letter from a collector complaining about being unable to find a single insurance company to cover one they wanted to buy. Hammons is an artist who knows he is expected to perform, but takes pleasure in implicating his audience.

If one thing did make sense about these shows’ locations, it is that Hammons is just as much a collector as the spaces’ owners: not of art but of stories. He uses the myths and fables that have accrued around his persona to make a point about misconstrued notions of black identity (still sadly contested, as evidenced by the continued shootings
of black people by police in the US): black history packaged through his own personal experience. These shows felt, in some respects, like an artist finally relenting to tell that story, but on his own terms. Furtive, mischievous, absent then suddenly present, Hammons seems perennially to be a step ahead of an art world that will always want more from him than he is prepared to give away.

The Rectangular Canvas is Dead
Richard Diebenkorn and the problems of modern painting
By Jed Perl
September 7, 2013

You have probably never heard of the young painter Eleanor Ray, but she is a virtuoso, no question about it. She also has a bad case of what I would call the teensies. Frankly, I worry that it may be terminal. Fresh out of graduate school, with a show at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects on the Lower East Side over the winter, Ray brings a tightly controlled painterly panache to her itsy-bitsy glimpses of the view through a window, or some empty shelves, or a bicycle locked to a post. The sizes of the panels on which she paints—one is two and one-quarter inches by two and three-quarters inches and the biggest is five by seven inches—suggest a reverse hubris, a pride in how much she can do with so little. There is something about Ray’s hunkered-down facility that strikes me as symptomatic of a fearfulness that overtakes all too many serious painters today. As much as I worry about the power of the trashmeisters who now dominate so many of our galleries and museums, I worry more about an atmosphere that makes it so difficult for painters who are actually engaged with the possibilities of brushes and pigments to feel free.

Eleanor Ray is in her mid-twenties. That is a time in artists’ lives when they ought to be trying things out, unafraid to make a bad painting. The best artists—the greatest artists—are not afraid to fail. As for Ray, instead of allowing herself to experiment, she remains armored inside her minuscule vignettes. Why this should be I can’t say for sure. But I have a theory. I wonder if Ray, coming of age at a time when painting is said by so many to be dead or dying, believes that the best she can do as a painter is keep a few tiny embers alive. You cannot help but feel a certain respect for her perfectly ordered minuscule vignettes, with their meticulously modulated grays and their knowing allusions to Morandi’s compositional strategies. When Ray paints light reflected off snow or coming through a crack in a door, she goes for a dashing verisimilitude—a sort of painterly déjà vu. The trouble is that the sizes of the paintings are designed to wrap up any unresolved conflicts in a perfect little package. You cannot really access these paintings. They’re so damn small that they feel as if they’re in lockdown. There is a sensibility here, but it is imprisoned. Whatever interesting conflicts and contradictions the subjects might provoke have been squared away without ever really being addressed.

Painting, which for centuries reigned supreme among the visual arts, has fallen from grace. I am quite sure that Eleanor Ray is aware of this. Every serious painter is. Which is not to say that painting is dead, or dying, or even in eclipse: excellent paintings have been done in the last few years, and there are masterpieces that date from the past quarter of a century. But the painter’s basic challenge, the manipulation of colors and forms and metaphors on the flat plane with its almost inevitably rectangular shape, is no longer generally seen as art’s alpha and omega, as the primary place in the visual arts where meaning and mystery are believed to come together. Everybody I know who paints or cares about painting worries about how we are going to respond to this turn of events. Ray is not alone in going into a defensive posture. With her lyrical painterly postcards, she strikes me as too willing to accept the idea that what has vanished in recent years, perhaps never to return, is painting as an expansive and foundational value or idea—as something worth boldly working for. There is no fight in her work. Behind the elegance of her effects, I sense the sadness of defeat. She is much too young for that.

What is to be done? Nothing at all, some would say. Many people who closely follow the visual arts subscribe to a cheerful chaos theory. And judged from such a perspective, anything goes: painting’s fall from grace is an interesting data point, nothing more. But the how and the why of that fall from grace remain to be understood. And understanding what has happened is an urgent matter, not only for the painters whose work still dominates many of the contemporary galleries but also for the gallerygoers and museumgoers who still look to their work. The arrival of a new painter in a blue-chip gallery can even now inspire enthusiasm, as Julie Mehretu’s first solo show at Marian Goodman’s New York gallery did this spring. Brett Baker, a painter who had an incisive and boisterous show of small abstract paintings at Elizabeth Harris this past winter, edits an online magazine called Painters’ Table, which reflects the invigorating range of intellectual conversation still inspired by the painter’s art. Painting’s fall from grace has precipitated quite a few exhibitions dedicated to revisionist and alternative histories of painting, including “Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s,” organized by the critic Raphael Rubinstein at Cheim & Read in New York over the summer. This show examines the work of fifteen artists, including Carroll Dunham, Bill Jensen, and Joan Snyder, with the goal of rethinking the state of painting in light of transformations in abstraction that began a generation ago. For those who want to look even farther back for promising directions that painters might further explore, there are certainly insights to be gained from an important survey of Richard Diebenkorn’s work from the 1950s and 1960s, currently at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Ever since the Renaissance, painting has been the grandest intellectual adventure in the visual arts, a titanic effort to encompass the glorious instability and variability of experience within the stability of a sharply delimited two-dimensional space. I think there is no question that the increasing marginalization of painting in recent decades has everything to do with a growing skepticism about even the possibility of stability. This skepticism now dominates thinking in the art schools, art history departments, museums, and international exhibitions where the shape of the artistic future is by and large determined. As every painter knows, of course, a certain amount of skepticism is part and parcel of the creative act, and the grandeur of painting’s stability has everything to do with all the ways in which the artist challenges and complicates that stability. Painting predicates an irrevocable fact—the plane of the canvas or panel on which the artist works—and then challenges that fundamental truth in an endless variety of ways. And that paradoxical situation may bring us to the reason why painting has fallen from grace. To uphold an absolute as well as all the arguments against that absolute, and to entertain both those positions at the same time, is something that our go-with-the-flow culture finds exceedingly uncomfortable.

Painters are aware of the problem. Nearly everybody now agrees that Clement Greenberg’s brief for the irrevocable stability of painting, a brief at once elegantly plainspoken and maddeningly pontifical, paid far too little attention to the varieties of instability that painting can embrace. There is a widespread suspicion that painting’s fall from grace can be blamed on the artists and the critics who conceived of its history in overly exclusionary terms. And so a thousand alternative histories have bloomed. The painter Carroll Dunham—who exhibits his widely praised and darkly comic canvases at Barbara Gladstone and also writes from time to time for Artforum—recently observed that “there are all kinds of parallel or shadow histories of the twentieth century that are constantly being reshuffled and rediscovered.” Who can disagree? You can find Dunham’s comment in a conversation with the painter Mark Greenwold, published in the catalogue of Greenwold’s show at Sperone Westwater in the Bowery this past spring. Greenwold’s show marked something of an apotheosis for an artist who is nothing if not a re-shuffler of histories and has until now mostly been admired by other artists. Greenwold’s paintings are deranged contemporary Boschian soap operas, in which the artist and his family and friends are represented with overgrown heads, crammed into claustrophobic interior spaces. In his recent paintings Greenwold has allowed bits of abstract imagery—what Dunham calls “Martian peacock” elements—to erupt in front of a face or above a person’s head. Greenwold is rejecting what he calls “this kind of sanitized notion that abstraction is on one side and figuration is the other side, and God forbid they should ever mix in art or in anything.”

Although I sometimes enjoy the finicky punctiliousness of Greenwold’s painterly technique, his work ultimately strikes me as sodden and melodramatic—Kafkaesque kitsch. But Greenwold is obviously an immensely intelligent man, and his conversation with Dunham reveals a good deal about how a serious contemporary painter grapples with the conflict between painting’s stability and painting’s instability. Greenwold struggles with what he describes as his training in “Greenbergian modernism.” While his work is loaded with local color, knotty narratives, psychological suggestions, and wacky humor, he comments somewhat confusingly that he is “not interested in, as I said, narrative and all that stuff. So my premise is Greenberg’s.” What I surmise he is trying to say is that he is interested in the construction of a painting as a formal act. In Greenwold’s case, the formal act is informed by a range of concerns that some might label literary. In addition to speaking about other painters, he comments on Philip Roth, the Yiddish theater, and Woody Allen’s roles in the movies he directs. He obviously admires Allen’s ability to do double-duty as director and actor. Greenwold similarly likes to take a starring part in his own compositions, with his round, bearded, bespectacled head and (often) buck-naked body front and center in his crazed conversation pieces. That Greenwold wants to present life as a freak show does not strike me as strange, not at all, but he fails to integrate the dissonant elements into a convincing whole.

This brings us to the crux of the problem. What is a stable whole that sufficiently acknowledges painting’s life-giving instability? That is the question that preoccupies painters today. And it comes as no surprise that Carroll Dunham, who obviously relishes his conversation with Greenwold, appears as one of the protagonists in the critic Raphael Rubinstein’s exhibition exploring the varieties of instability that nourish recent abstract painting. Looking back to what more than a dozen abstract artists were doing in the 1980s, Rubinstein discovers something rather like Dunham’s “parallel or shadow histories”—what Rubinstein calls “an alternative genealogy for contemporary painting.” Seen at Cheim & Read, “Reinventing Abstraction” certainly has its pleasures. These include Dunham’s elegantly eccentric Horizontal Bands (1982–1983), the cool formal title giving no hint as to the jam-up of witty, bulbous, bulb-and-root forms; Joan Snyder’s rapturous lyric pastoral Beanfield With Music (1984), with its luxuriantly orchestrated cacophony of greens; and Bill Jensen’s The Tempest (1980–1981), a floating enigma like an astral starfish with a sci-fi snout, at once melancholy and oracular. The other artists in the show are Louise Fishman, Mary Heilmann, Jonathan Lasker, Stephen Mueller, Elizabeth Murray, Thomas Nozkowski, David Reed, Pat Steir, Gary Stephan, Stanley Whitney, Jack Whitten, and Terry Winters.

Rubinstein wants to move beyond the shopworn talk about the death of painting or the return of painting to “the urgent task of building a bridge from the radical, deconstructive abstraction of the late 1960s and 1970s (which many of [the artists in the show] had been marked by) toward a larger painting history and more subjective approaches.” What Rubinstein is arguing for is the polar opposite of Eliot’s impersonal view of the past in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”—the “larger painting history” he advocates is nourished by a wide range of highly personal, subjective approaches. The fact that the works included in “Reinventing Abstraction” look very different from one another is precisely the point. If the artists are joined in their taste for heterogeneity, that taste also divides them, for each is heterogeneous in his or her own way. We find here more or less painterly ways of painting, experiments with a range of flat and relatively deep spaces, and the incorporation of elements ranging from nearly naturalistic to thoroughly nonobjective. If I understand Rubinstein correctly, he wants to rediscover avenues in recent artistic tradition too little seen or understood, and in so doing to excavate routes from the more distant past to the present.

I am sympathetic with Rubinstein’s project. Certainly you can make a strong case that the history of painting consists of nothing more than the individual histories of painters. But as Rubinstein is also well aware, the history of painting must ultimately be something more than an anthology of individual histories. If the danger of a totally integrated history of painting is that it degenerates into a frozen academicism, the danger of a thousand individual histories is that painting becomes no more than another competitor in the bazaar that is contemporary art, a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, with no more claim on our attention than anything else.

One would hope that some more general principle could be derived from the personal histories that rivet us. It is precisely the possibility of discovering the general within the particular that drew me to San Francisco, for a major exhibition at the de Young Museum of the work that Richard Diebenkorn did as a relatively young man in the 1950s and 1960s. “Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years: 1953–1966” was organized by Timothy Anglin Burgard, a curator at the de Young (which is part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco); the exhibition goes to the Palm Springs Art Museum in the fall. While everybody knows that Diebenkorn painted his figures, still lifes, and landscapes under the impact of Matisse, the lessons that he drew from Matisse are far richer and more paradoxical than has generally been acknowledged. Diebenkorn cuts straight through the reductive formal strategies that are all too often said to be Matisse’s central gift to twentieth-century art, and recovers Matisse’s concern with the painting as symbolist experience.

Beginning with the abstract landscapes of the early 1950s, Diebenkorn refuses to allow his paintings to make sense either in purely naturalistic or purely abstract terms. He walks a tightrope in his figures and landscapes of the late 1950s and early 1960s—the best work he ever did—as he moves from passages of almost atmospheric tonal color to strident arrangements of full-strength red, orange, purple, yellow, green, and blue. He convinces me that it is the force of his feelings that precipitates his hyperbolic colors and forms. And his feelings seem to keep changing, even within a single painting, so that sometimes a woman’s arm is a woman’s arm and a wedge of sky is a wedge of sky, and sometimes a woman’s arm is a dead weight and a wedge of sky is an abyss.

Particularly fascinating is the relationship between Diebenkorn’s paintings and the considerable number of drawings in the de Young show, especially of female figures clothed and nude. Although most of the drawings included date from after the preponderance of the figure paintings were done in the late 1950s, a photograph of Diebenkorn at a drawing session in 1956 and another photograph, this one by Hans Namuth, of Diebenkorn drawing his wife in 1958 make it clear that drawing and painting proceeded at least on parallel tracks. Diebenkorn’s drawings of women, whether still quite young or on the cusp of middle age, reveal a considerable range of emotions: sexual charm and challenge are mingled with anguish, anxiety, and ennui. With their casual haircuts, unselfconscious glances, and long, sexy legs, these women suggest all the tensions and roiling excitement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the Eisenhower years were ending and ambitions erotic and otherwise were increasingly openly expressed. (The only other artist whose drawings of that time suggest such a grown-up feeling for male-female relations is R. B. Kitaj, and the two painters became friends when Kitaj spent time in California in the 1960s.) If Diebenkorn always regarded drawing and painting as separate activities—and is generally more of a naturalist on paper than on canvas—we can also see how the psychological crosscurrents in the drawings are enlarged and in a way allegorized in the paintings, where the increasingly abstract use of color and shape take on an emblematic power.

I have heard it said by some painters that Diebenkorn was unable to place his figures in a legible three-dimensional space. But he was perfectly capable of doing so in the drawings—so who can doubt that when he turned to painting he wanted to do something rather different? In Woman on a Porch (1958), one of the finest of the paintings in which figure and landscape are joined or juxtaposed, we do not know that the woman is on a porch, and that is probably what Diebenkorn intended. The figure, seated in what looks like a wicker chair, seen from the knees up, her head downward cast, is set against a landscape of strong horizontal forms. The color is extravagant, maybe gaudy, with oranges that verge on the lurid and with blackish, purplish blues. The woman’s body, solid and sensual, is monumentalized. She is a totem, an icon, a pure contemplative power merging with the blocky forms of the landscape, a human puzzle knit into the puzzle of the landscape. Although certainly not abstract, the painting is also not exactly representational, certainly not a representation of reality. The landscape’s strong colors and enigmatically simplified forms become emblematic of the woman’s state of mind. What does she feel? The answer is to be discovered in how the colors and forms feel. And if that is difficult to determine—well, aren’t a person’s feelings often difficult to explain?

In the late 1950s, Diebenkorn said that “all paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. To call this expression abstract seems to me often to confuse the issue.” Diebenkorn is associating himself with a tradition that I would characterize in the broadest sense as symbolist. The enigma of human consciousness is revealed indirectly, through a pictorial environment in which naturalistic perceptions have been transformed by the myriad processes and pressures of the imagination. The frame of a window becomes a prison. The blue of the horizon becomes a promise. Diebenkorn’s figures are a considerable contribution to a modern symbolist tradition that includes Redon’s phantasmagorical portraits, Vuillard’s luxuriantly perfervid interiors, Matisse’s studies of Madame Matisse crowned by extraordinary hats, and Bonnard’s climactic painting of his wife in the bathtub, in which the white tile walls explode in a riot of ardent color.

Considering how unwilling Diebenkorn was to retreat to the safety of a format or a formula in the 1950s and early 1960s, it is thrilling to realize how many good and maybe even great paintings there are. Santa Cruz I (1962), a view of ocean and ocean-side buildings, is as convincing a portrait of the California coastline as I know, a worthy successor to Matisse’s views of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Some tiny still lifes done in 1963—a knife in a glass of water, a knife cutting through a tomato—are in the tradition of Manet’s quick little compositions and may well be superior to them in their firm architecture and unsentimental lucidity. There are some extraordinary interiors in which a human presence is suggested with haunting circumspection by means of a painting of a woman’s head leaning against a wall or a group of figure drawings pinned to the studio wall. Diebenkorn’s restlessness is one of the fascinations of midcentury art, as he moves from the almost crude figural style of Coffee (1959) to the Ingresque sensuality of Sleeping Woman (1961). Diebenkorn is of course hardly alone in the directions he took in those years. On the East Coast quite a few artists who had emerged amid the culture of abstraction were evolving original figurative styles, among them Fairfield Porter and Louisa Matthiasdottir—but Diebenkorn may be the only artist who at least for a time managed to impose so insistently abstract and symbolic an imagination on the figure and the landscape without yielding to simplistic solutions.

Diebenkorn’s figures, landscapes, and still lifes from the late 1950s and early 1960s are a reminder of how much instability must be encompassed within the stability of a painting. As for the Ocean Park series that preoccupied Diebenkorn as he grew older (he died in 1993), I wonder if the more formalized and regularized abstract processes involved in those paintings did not reflect the worries of an artist who had once upon a time put stability at such considerable risk. I would not want to press too hard on a psychological interpretation of Diebenkorn’s development. Suffice it to say that the conundrum for painters in the past several decades has been how to maintain some dependable conception of what painting is all about while insisting on the freedom of action needed to keep that concept alive. To do so successfully involves quite a juggling act. In the past couple of years I have sensed in the work of painters who hold a particular interest for significant numbers of other painters—they include John Dubrow, Bill Jensen, Joan Snyder, and Thornton Willis—the sobering challenges involved in maintaining both some reliable standard and the freedom to take fresh risks. There is always the necessity to hold the line even as one goes over the line, to maintain some sense of what painting is before all else in the face of an environment in which anything goes.

The evolution of painting is inevitably as much a matter of repetition as it is a matter of change. But what is too little change and what is too much? As Rubinstein observes in the catalogue of “Reinventing Abstraction,” it is significant that after all the talk in the 1960s and 1970s of the shaped canvas and the end of the tyranny of the rectangle, the artists in his show—with the exception of Elizabeth Murray—have found themselves loyal to the framing rectangle. With painting, we recognize the excitement of the new not so much through its distance from earlier work as in the extent to which the old ways are given some new sting or attack or power. The wide panoramic abstractions in Julie Mehretu’s show at Marian Goodman this spring, with their layering of architectural elements and their dramatically deep space, put me in mind of Al Held’s later work, which also had a cinematic and even a sci-fi quality. And that connection interested me, reviving as it did unresolved feelings I have always had about Held’s pictorial dramaturgy. As for the lush, thickly applied color in Brett Baker’s small abstractions, at Elizabeth Harris over the winter, they brought to mind Paul Klee’s Magic Squares and the weavings of Anni Albers and Sheila Hicks—the question became how Baker’s own feeling for sensuous coloristic hedonism is strengthened and deepened by the restraining power of a grid. The beauty of painting is that we experience the individualism of the painter but never exactly in isolation. The painter is always simultaneously in the community of painters, of the present and of the past.
The trouble is that you cannot really get down to the business of painting when you are forced into either a defensive or an offensive pose.

To assert that painting is a great tradition is to assert the obvious. Nobody would disagree, even those who take no interest whatsoever in contemporary painting. The problem for contemporary painters begins with the collapse of the framing rectangle as the artist’s essential way of experiencing the world. I am not sure to what degree the stabilizing supremacy of that rectangle has been undermined by the technology that surrounds us, whether the layered space of the computer screen, the roving eye of the digital camera, or the increasing ubiquity of 3-D movies. But even if the rectangle remains essential, its centrality unexpectedly reaffirmed by the shape of the iPad and the iPhone, there is no question that we are increasingly encouraged to regard continuous visual flux as the fundamental artistic experience. When the Dadaists in the 1920s and even the postmodernists in the 1970s and 1980s turned their backs on painting, they tended to assume that it was still there, behind them, a stable fact. Now painting itself is frequently seen as simply another dissident form, a way of turning one’s back on moving images or performance art or assemblage. All too often today, when painters walk out of their studios, they find themselves in a defensive posture or an offensive one, with painting their shield or their battering ram. The trouble is that you cannot really get down to the business of painting when you are forced into either a defensive or an offensive pose.

The great question now is how to preserve and even honor the age-old stability of painting without falling into the trap of a frozen academicism. Richard Diebenkorn, in his figure and landscape paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s, suggests a provocative balance, one worth reinvestigating. The bottom line is that each artist must now begin pretty much from scratch, obliged to develop both a personal conservatism and a personal radicalism. This is the painter’s predicament.

Jed Perl is the art critic for The New Republic and the author, most recently, of Magicians and Charlatans (Eakins Press Foundation).
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Changes abound for the upcoming Miami Art Basel week 2015. The NADA Art Fair has a new home – the spectacular billion dollar upgraded historic Fontainbleau Hotel. In all previous locations the fair was free to enter – no more; it now $20 a head. The Rubell Family Collection stays in the forefront of the pulse of the artworld with an all woman artists exhibition that will rotate works over the duration of the show. The Marguiles Warehouse will feature a massive four custom built room exhibition of the work of Anselm Kiefer, whose retrospective I saw at the Royal Academy in London in the fall of 2014. The ICA Miami will be getting its new building in 2017 – meanwhile it will have a show of the NYC video artist Alex Bag. The de la Cruz Collection is doing a survey show loaded with art stars working in abstraction. With NADA, Scope, Pulse all having returned to Miami Beach, the major art fair action on the Miami side is now Art Miami and its Context Art Fair. Miami Projects has also moved to Miami Beach into the Deauville Hotel, which NADA just left after last year. Also up will be three stellar shows at Mana Contemporary – including the Frederick Weisman art foundation in Los Angeles, a selection of the Jorge Perez collection, and a selection of Latin America art. There will also be work from artists working in Bushwick. The other major offering will be the exhibition of representational and realist art curated by Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian that will be in the Moore Building in Miami’s white-hot Design District, and the Nari Ward retrospective at the Perez Art Museum, now under the direction of Franklin Sirmans. Isaac Julien’s 15 screen video project commission for Rolls Royce makes its North American debut at Young Arts in Wynnwood.

Miami has a couple of new gallery districts – Little River and Little Haiti, that offer warehouse sized exhibition spaces.

Up the road we can look forward to the opening of the Faena Arts Center in Miami Beach, the new ICA Miami building, and the Museum of Latin American art by Miami gallerist Gary Nader.

Vincent Johnson is an artist and writer in Los Angeles. he recently interviewed William Pope L. at MoCA in Los Angeles for the November 2015, 15th Anniversary issue of FROG magazine.

Art Basel 2015 Sketch Book: 8 Artists to Watch

By Galena Mosovich | Miami.com

Created 12/02/2015 – 20:27

Original sketches by eight Miami-based artists who are making an impact during Miami Art Week

As a cadre of the world’s best artists and art aficionados converge in Miami, it’s easy to gloss over the local talent pool. To combat this marginalization, we honed in on the consequential careers of eight local artists, who embody the city’s distinct language of creativity. We asked them to create a unique sketch for our first Miami.com Art Basel Sketch Book.

In his own words: My body of work is, and will be, a group of associated ideas constructed over the next ten years. This includes a working particle accelerator and launching a satellite into Low Earth Orbit (LEO).Why he’s hot: Farooq is taking a childhood pastime to the next level with the creation of a functional paper airplane. In this case, it’s a full-scale replica— 102 percent-to-scale, to be exact— of the Soviet-made MiG-21 fighter jet. As the son of a civil engineer, Farooq juggled his artistic inclinations with a knack for technical skills in the territories of welding, electronics and the theoretical frameworks behind working machinery.

Where to find him now: Farooq’s studio is included in the official Art Basel Artist Studio Visits (open to ABMB VIP cardholders).
Future happenings: The reveal of his 4,000-pound paper plane is slated for 2016.

In her own words: I’m a multimedia artist who explores ideas through sculpture with felt as well as collage and printmaking.Why she’s hot: Pratorius’ use of hand-cut felt is spontaneous and mysterious. She doesn’t set the forms before installation, and this technique allows for the material’s “inherent sensuality” to express itself in the sculpture. Her pieces argue against permanence, as they can never be repeated once removed from the wall or space.
Where to find her now: Pratorius’ work is on display with Miami’s Independent Thinkers at Scope Art Fair, Miami Beach; with Cancio Contemporary at Aqua Art Fair, Miami Beach; and in “100+ Degrees in the Shade: A Survey of South Florida Art” at Laundromat Art Space, 5900 NE 2nd Ave., Miami.
Future happenings: Solo show at &Gallery in Miami, Feb. 2016.

In his own words: I create in the genre of photo and hyperrealism, a style dedicated to giving the viewer a closer look.
Why he’s hot: This rising star artist also happens to be a successful music producer, whose work is closely linked to Timbaland and Missy Elliott. He started teaching himself to paint a few years ago with a focus on making random and saccharine objects seem grander through sharp lines and vibrant colors. While deeply influenced by Jeff Koons, Wizz Dumb’s style of pop art is sweeter and less irreverent — for now.

Where to find him now: Search Instagram for @wizz_dumb_art.

Future happenings: Wizz Dumb’s work will be on view at The Taplin Gallery at Miami Country Day School in Miami Shores, Feb. – April 2016.

In his own words: I’d rather be hungry in the jungle than fed up in the zoo. My work is dimensional, layered, painterly and shows a cohesive yet multifaceted range.Why he’s hot: Fila parlayed his top-notch education from Design and Architecture Senior High (DASH) in the Design District and Columbus College of Art and Design into a dynamic career as an artist. He’s considered an OG of the Miami street art scene, under the moniker “Krave” (Erin, Sunbather, The Fresh Monkey), yet his animations, urban sculptures and figurative to abstract paintings on wood are also quite popular amongst collectors and corporations.

Where to find him now: Fila will paint live Saturday, Dec. 5 during an intimate event with Locos por Juana at El Fresco, his project space/gallery in Little Havana (535 SW 12th Ave., Miami). 8 p.m. Tickets are $24. RSVP to http://www.estamosjuntos.splashthat.com.

Future happenings: Fila will start his national mural campaign in the coming months in North Carolina and Oregon.

In her own words: My work explores how technology and the Internet affects our identities, lives and experiences.

Why she’s hot: Mayer’s oeuvre is highly in tune with the digital age.

Through videos, online experiences, photography, telephone numbers, performance, sculpture and installation, her work investigates the tension between physical and digital statements of identity. This summer, Mayer’s work graced the cover of Ocean Drive magazine; the featured piece was auctioned off to support Locust Projects, the Design District exhibition space that launched her career.
Where to find her now: Mayer’s work is on view in “Spirit Your Mind,” a group exhibition presented by Chalet Society and Locust Projects at Free Spirits Sports Cafe, 100 21st St., Miami Beach.

Future happenings: Solo shows in 2016 at LAX ART in Los Angeles and David Castillo Gallery in Miami. A TV pilot created with Lucas Leyva, co-founder of the Borscht Film Festival, is in the works for Time-Warner.

In his own words: “I like my sugar with coffee and cream.” – Beastie BoysWhy he’s hot: In 2013, Vanity Fair selected Drain to participate in the Greatest Living Artists Survey, a poll in which the magazine asked 14 key artists— including Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra and Jeff Koons— to list their favorite contemporaries. Drain’s number one was Jasper Johns. His mesmerizing abstract textile sculptures typically evoke the innocence of youth held up by masterful construction. (And, he knits!) The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) also holds a few of his paper pieces in its permanent collection.
Where to find him now: The Standard Spa, Miami Beach and The Posters celebrate the hotel’s 10-year anniversary with a specially commissioned poster by Drain. The poster, with his signature low-res look, is $55 at The Shop inside the hotel (a portion of the proceeds will benefit Miami Children’s Museum). New York’s Printed Matter independent bookstore and gallery is showing Drain’s work in a shared booth with Art Metropole from Toronto at Art Basel in the Miami Beach Convention Center (Entrance Hall B, booth T3).

Future happenings: Drain’s Pleated Gnomon Sundial at Key Biscayne’s Village Green will be completed by the end of the month.

In his own words: A painterly language of strong, broken color and aggressive mark-making that connects to and illustrates the attitude and energy of the subject.Why he’s hot: Vasquez introduces the viewer to the neighborhood street gang from the perspective of a young boy looking for a role model in the absence of a father figure. The gang becomes the worldview and his paintings, collages and installations illuminate the subjects’ frenzied search for identity, community and masculinity in the most unexpected places (read: the walls of a museum or gallery).
Where to find him now: Vasquez’s work is included in the “No Commissions” Art Fair presented by Swizz Beats at The Dean Collection, 35 NE 29th St., Miami and in “100+ Degrees in the Shade: A Survey of South Florida Art” at the venue in the Design District (3900 N. Miami Ave., Miami).

Future happenings: The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition “Portraiture Now: Staging the Self” is on view at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico through March 27, 2016. In collaboration with the Aesthetics and Values class at Florida International University, Vasquez will exhibit at The Patricia & Phillip Frost Museum of Art next spring.

Yves Behar is the recipient of the 2015 Design Miami “Design Visionary Award” and he’ll be honored with a special exhibit in the D/M venue behind the convention center through December 6. The VIP preview is today, December 1st. A student team from Harvard was chosen to design the fair’s entrance for their submission, “UNBUILT,” a collection of foam models of unrealized design projects. Expect thirty five exhibitors inside including Firma Casa from Brazil, showing new works by the Campana Brothers, and Italian gallery Secondome, with hand-crafted limited editions.

The Miami Project is also launching a new spin-off this year called SATELLITE that will show various “experimental” projects in unoccupied properties up near their 73rd Street base. One of those, “Artist-Run,” will fill the rooms in the Ocean Terrace Hotel (7410 Ocean Terrace, Miami Beach) with different installations from 40 artist-run spaces, curated by Tiger Strikes Asteroid. It’s open from December 2nd to 6th, with a VIP/media event today, December 1st, from noon to 10 p.m. ALSO: Trans-Pecos, the music venue out in Queens, New York, and Sam Hillmer from the band Zs, are putting together a 5-day music program in the North Beach Amphitheater, emphasizing “musical practitioners with some form of art practice.”

X Contemporary launches their inaugural fair in Wynwood running from December 2nd through Sunday, and a VIP opening on December 1st from 5 to 10 p.m. Twenty eight exhibitiors will be on hand, plus special projects including “Grace Hartigan: 1960 – 1965” presented by Michael Klein Arts; a look at the “genesis of street art” curated by Pamela Willoughby; and “Colombia N.O.W.” presented by TIMEBAG.

Target Too InstallationPULSE Miami Beach returns to Indian Beach Park (4601 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach) starting with a big “Opening Celebration” at 4 p.m. today, December 1st, featuring a panel discussion put together by Hyperallergic; an interactive piece by Kate Durbin called “Hello, Selfie!” and a live performance by Kalup Linzy. On December 5th, PULSE celebrates the City of Miami via a talk at 5 p.m. on “Future Visions of Miami” and a “Sunset Celebration” from 5 to 7 p.m. Fair visitors can check out “TARGET TOO,” an installation referencing items sold at the stores, originally on view in NYC last March. There’s a complimentary shuttle from the convention center, and the fair is open daily from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. through Saturday.

Wynwood Walls (2520 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami) has a lot planned this year including “Walls of Change” with 14 new murals and installations and the debut of a new adjacent space called “The Wynwood Walls Garden.” The walls are by Case, Crash, Cryptik, el Seed, Erenest Zacharevic, Fafi, Hueman, INTI, The London Police, Logan Hicks and Ryan McGinness. Over in the “garden,” the Spanish art duo Pichi & Avo are doing a mural on stacked shipping containers and in the events space, Magnus Sodamin will be painting the floors and walls. The VIP opening is on December 1st in the early evening, but then it’s open to the public from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. Goldman Properties’ CEO Jessica Goldman Srebnick talks about how art transformed the Wynwood neighborhood in THIS Miami New Times piece. We also hear that New York developer (and owner of Moishe’s Moving, Mana Contemporary etc.) Moishe Mana is planning a new mixed-use development on his 30 acres of land in the middle of Wynwood.

Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian are co-presenting an exhibition of figurative painting and sculpture called “UnRealism” at 191 NE 40th Street, Miami. The opening is on Tuesday, December 1st, but it will be on view all week. According to the NYT, artists featured in the group show will include Urs Fischer, Elizabeth Peyton, John Currin and David Salle. In conjunction with the exhibition, the artist Rashaad Newsome will lead an “art parade” starting at 6:30 p.m. today at 23 NE 41st Street, Miami and ending at 4001 NE 41st Street.

CONTEXT Art Miami will feature 95 international galleries this year, along with several artist projects and installations including 12 listening stations dedicated to sound art; areas dedicated to art from Berlin and Korea; solo exhibitions by Jung San, Satoru Tamura, Mr. Herget and four others; and a “fast-track” portrait project of workers at Miami International Airport. Context and Art Miami — celebrating its 26th year — open with a VIP preview benefiting the Perez Art Museum Miami on Tuesday, December 1, 5:30 to 10 p.m., at 2901 NE 1st Avenue in Midtown, Miami. The fair is open to the public from December 2nd through the 6th.

ICA Miami (4040 NE 2nd Avenue, Miami) opens a major survey of works by the video and performance artist Alex Bag — including her interactive installation “The Van” — on December 1st. The museum recently announced the appointment of Ellen Salpeter, Deputy Director of NYC’s Jewish Museum, as its new director and they’ve just broken ground on a new, permanent home in the Design District. The 37,500 -square-foot building was designed by the Spanish firm Aranguren & Gallegos Arquitectos and is scheduled to open in 2017. Shannon Ebner also has a show, “A Public Character,” on view in the museum during AB/MB and up until January 16, 2016. This is the inaugural program in the museum’s new performance series.

The fourth edition of UNTITLED Miami is on the beach at Ocean Drive and 12th Street from December 2 to 6, with a big VIP preview on December 1st from 4 to 8 p.m. They’ve got 119 international galleries along with non-profit orgs from 20 countries. New this year will be an UNTITLED radio station broadcasting via local Wynwood Radio with interviews, performances and playlists by artists, curators etc.

PAPER Magazine is hosting (and participating in) several events during AB/MB. On Tuesday, December 1st, 6 p.m., David Hershkovits will be “in conversation” with Fab 5 Freddy and David Koh on the topic, “Art On Film,” followed by a special screening of Koh’s film “Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict.” The Tribeca Film Festival Shortlist is presenting the event at The Miami Edition (2901 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach) and SOTO sake sponsors. On Tuesday night (late) and also at the EDITION, PAPER, Silencio, A Hotel Life and One Management host the one year anniversary of the hotel’s BASEMENT nightclub with DJs Seth Troxler, Nicolas Matar and Orazio Rispo.

The Wolfsonsonian FIU Museum (1001 Washington Avenue, South Beach) is open all week with several exhibitions including “An Artist on the Eastern Front: Feliks Topolski 1941,” “Margin of Error,” “Orange Oratory,” “Philodendrum” and “Miami Beach.”

Moishe Mana’s Mana Contemporary (318 NW 23rd Street, Miami) in Wynwood plans several exhibitions during AB/MB including “Made in California,” featuring selections from L.A. collector Frederick R. Weisman’s Art Foundation; “A Sense of Place,” with over 60 works from the collection of Jorge M. Perez; and “Everything You Are Not,” key works of Latin American art from the Tiroche DeLeon collection. All are up from December 3rd thru the 6th, with a VIP preview on December 1st. Mana Urban Arts is also doing a collab with The Bushwick Collective at the former RC Cola Plant (550 NW 24th Street, Miami) that includes over 50 artists — so far the list includes Ghost, GIZ, Pixel Pancho, Case Maclaim and Shok-1 — plus skateboarding, DJs, live music etc.

Bortolami Gallery is opening a year-long exhibition called “Miami” by the French conceptual artist Daniel Buren on December 1st in the M Building (194 NW 30th Street, Miami). The show marks the 50th anniversary of his works with fabric and the 8.7 cm stripe. By periodically installing new works, Buren will also alter the exhibition during the year.

Previewing their upcoming South Beach studio, SoulCycle will pop-up poolside at the 1 Hotel (2341 Collins Avenue, South Beach) starting on Tuesday, December 1st. They plan to open permanently in the hotel in January 2016. The 1 Hotel also offers a fitness and wellness line-up for guests and visitors all week.

Miami gallery Locust Projects (3852 N. Miami Avenue, Miami) returns with their “Art on the Move” series of artists’ projects in public spaces around Miami during December. This year’s work, “NITE LIFE,” by LA-based artist Martine Syms, includes a series of prints displayed on the backs of buses and at bus stops, based on “Chitlin’ Circuit” concert posters by Clyde Killens. There’s a reception for the project, curated by PAMM’s director Franklin Sirmans, on December 1st, 7 to 10 p.m. Also check out the gallery’s site-specific installation “PORE” by Martha Friedman and “Beatriz Monteavaro: Nochebuena” in the project room.

Brickell City Centre (750 South Miami Avenue, Miami) is giving a sneak peek at their work-in-progress development in downtown Miami with an invite-only event, “Illuminate the Night,” on December 1st featuring the unveiling of “Dancers,” a sculpture by UK artist Allen Jones; () music from Wooden Wisdom DJs (Elijah Wood and Zach Cowie) and a 150,000 square-foot glass, steel and fabric structure called “Climate Ribbon” by Hugh Dutton.

The Bass Museum (2100 Collins Avenue, South Beach) is closed for renovations until next year, but they’re still hosting “outdoor activations” in the surrounding park including the AB/MB PUBLIC sector and the display of a neon sign, “Eternity Now,” by Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury. They are co-hosting a private dinner with Salon 94 Gallery on Tuesday in the Miami Beach EDITION Hotel.

Zurich’s Galerie Gmurzynska hosts an invite-only cocktail party at The Villa Casa Casuarina (1116 Ocean Drive, Miami Beach) on December 1, with Sylvester Stallone and Germano Celant. The gallery will be showing a retrospective of works by Karl Lagerfield in their stand at AB/MB, curated by Celant.

The DREAM South Beach (1111 Collins Avenue, South Beach) hooked-up with Brooklyn-based artist — and new GQ “style guy” — Mark Anthony Green for an exhibition of, according to Green, “what 2015 meant to me in both a macro and micro sense…wins, losses, heartbreak and promotion.” The hotel will have a pop-up shop curated by the artist, and guests will get a complimentary print. There’s a welcome reception on Tuesday, a private dinner and afterparty with the Green and A$AP Rocky on Friday and a pool party hosted by YESJULZ on Sunday afternoon.

FLAUNT Magazine and Guess host a private dinner at the Nautilus Hotel in December 1 in honor of their latest cover stars Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Julie Mehretu. After dinner, there’s a poolside party with a screening of “ME” and music by the Martinez Brothers and Pusha T. Expected guests include “ME” writers Susan Taylor & Jefrey Levy and Gina Gershon.

The 2015 edition of Elle Decor’s Modern Life Concept House premieres with a VIP breakfast on December 1st at 250 Wynwood (250 NW 24th Street, Miami). Visits from December 2 to 4 are open to the public with a $35 donation to pediatric cancer research and a reservation via jacquelyn@zm-pr.com. The 6,000 square-foot home will showcase 4 leading designers selected by ED editor-in-chief Michael Boodro.

An exhibition called “LAX – MIA: Light + Space” opens on Tuesday, December 1st, 5 to 8 p.m., at the Surf Club (9011 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach). The show was curated by Terry Riley, Joachim Pissaro and John Keenan of PARALLEL and is hosted by The Surf Club and Fort Partners. It’s on view until December 12th, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, closed on Sunday.

Art Basel Basecamp (46 NW 36th Street, Miami), hosted by HGABmag, returns with a space to “re-group, re-fresh and re-energize” featuring charging stations, information booths, giveaways and art installations. Stop in from December 1 to 6, 4 p.m. to midnight daily; and don’t miss their “Alice in Wynwood” closing party on Saturday night.

The first edition of the Curatorial Program for Research Film Festival takes place on December 1, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Cannonball (1035 North Miami Avenue, Suite 300, Miami). The program, “Earthbound,” was curated by Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk in collaboration with Dwelling Projects. There will also be a silent auction.

New York-based developer Robbie Antonio debuts his REVOLUTION collection of pre-crafted structures during Design Miami/2015. The limited edition homes and pavilions have been designed by 30 noted architects and designers including Zaha Hadid, Richard Gluckman and the Campana Brothers. The VIP launch is in the Design Miami tent on Tuesday evening.

NYC club No.8 pops-up in the Rec Room at the Gale Hotel (1690 Collins Avenue, South Beach) with DJs including JusSke, Fly Guy and Ross One; the hotel’s Regent Cocktail Club features live jazz, Cuban cocktails, Samba and soul tunes. They’ve also got a digital art installation by Aerosyn Lex.

White Cube’s kick-off party is tonight at Soho Beach House with Giogio Moroder spinning and lots of Moet.

Blog

Must-See New Media at Miami Art Week

This time of the year, the whole art scene gathers in Miami to—let’s be honest—enjoy the beach, often more than the overwhelming art-filled fairs. Many of our longtime favorite creators converge at this year’s festivities, so to support their efforts, we’ve compiled a coup d’oeil of some quality digital art happenings.

Swapping its successful one-shot hypersalon satellite project for a PULSE Miami Beach booth, TRANSFER gallery offers a more streamlined way to reach a wider audience. “The collaborative experiment that was hypersalon set in motion so many amazing exhibitions and exchanges that unfolded in the past year. But in the end, we managed to create a mostly non-commercial format amidst the biggest feeding frenzy of the commercial art world—not a sustainable project in the ABMB environment,” Kelani Nichole, founder and director of TRANSFER tells The Creators Project.

“This year, I went for the exact opposite, securing a white cube in a tent on the beach. TRANSFER is quite fortunate to have the support of PULSE to open their fair to a challenging format of social-media based performance, and their Conversations curated section gave us the perfect opportunity to present two artists working with issues of technology and the body,” Nichole adds. TRANSFER showcases recent works by Faith Holland and Kate Durbin with support from Giovanna Olmos. Both artists will be taking part in panels and screenings.

Holland brings her orgasm-inspired and cumshot-generated bodies of works—including her figurative and dynamic Visual Orgasms GIF series and juicy abstract Ookie Canvas paintings, comprising a never-seen-before composition called Peter North. Kate Durbin will present video pieces created from footage of previous iterations of Hello!Selfie, a social media-rooted performance that explores and questions selfie culture in public spaces.

On the other side of the bay, Wynwood-located X-contemporary provides viewers with a bunch of activities ranging from panel discussions, art, and DJ performances, to one-of-a-kind projects in addition to the many artworks showcased by the 30 or so worldwide exhibitors.

“bitforms gallery has been a part of the contemporary art world for 14 years,” Steven Sacks, director and owner of bitforms gallery tells us.“We have a very specific focus on new media artists covering a wide range of generations and media types.” His booth brings an impressive roster of artworks by artists such as Manfred Mohr, Daniel Canogar, Jonathan Monaghan, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Sara Ludy, and Quayola, artists who all strongly contribute to the solidification of new media art within the ruthless contemporary art landscape.

“The art fairs are an amazing place to reach thousands of art-centric people and introduce and educate them about our unique program, which typically does stand out amongst more traditional galleries. UNTITLED art fair is a smaller, curated fair with more experimental artists, compared to the larger Art Basel fair, which has a lot more traditional art,” Sacks concludes.

Chic Report

The Definitive Guide to Art Basel Miami 2015, Part One

So you’ve made it to MIA for Art Basel 2015, but have you secured a coveted spot on the event’s hautest guest lists? Fear not—we’ve got intel on all the can’t-miss pop-ups, star-studded bashes, and gallery celebrations of the week. Check back for part deux, tomorrow. We hope you remembered to pack your VIP card with your sunnies…

Locust Projects Celebrates “Martha Friedman: Pore”Intel: The nonprofit space Locust Projects is hosting a cocktail reception celebrating Martha Friedman’s new site-specific installation Pore, which includes four sculptures made from 1,000 pounds of rubber (they’re attached to costumes that will be activated during an experimental performance by dancer Silas Reiner).
Logistics: 3852 North Miami Avenue, 7-10 p.m.

Brickell City Centre BashIntel: Brickell City Centre is transforming one block of its three-block construction site into an event space. Wooden Wisdom (Elijah Wood + Zach Cowie) will set the vibe. VIPs and local influencers will join Brickell for a lighting ceremony of its newly completed Climate Ribbon (150,000-square-foot glass, steel and fabric by designer Hugh Dutton).Location: Brickell City Centre, 67 SW 8th St., 7 p.m. RSVP to Brickellcitycentre@taraink.com

Boho Hunter Basel Kick OffIntel: Monica Sordo invites those in MIA to visit Boho Hunter for cocktails, music by Bea Pernia, and a selection of her collection with sales to benefit The Duerme Tranquilo Foundation.Location: Boho Hunter, 184 NW 27th St., 7-10 p.m.

Tribeca Shortlist “Art on Film”Intel: The movie streaming service from Lionsgate and Tribeca Enterprises hosts “Art on Film” with hip hop pioneer, visual artist and filmmaker Fab 5 Freddy (Fred Brathwaite), independent producer David Koh (Submarine Entertainment) and moderated by PAPER Magazine founder/editor David Hershkovits. Following will be a special screening of the film Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict.Location: The Miami Beach EDITION, 2901 Collins Ave., 6 p.m. RSVP to rsvp@tribecashortlist.com

PAMM Presents: Dimensions, by Devonté Hynes and Ryan McNamaraIntel: Flock to Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) for a one night only performance by Ryan McNamara and Devonté (“Dev”) Hynes, including an original multi-part composition by Hynes, an internationally-acclaimed musician and producer, and sculptural elements and choreography by McNamara, a celebrated performance artistLocation: 1103 Biscayne Boulevard, 9 p.m. to midnight

Brown Jordan and SunbrellaIntel:The two join photographer Gray Malin for a celebration of art, design and travel, for a first look at the new Miami Design District flagship, an 8,600 square-foot, three-level store of re-imagined native Florida materials, which officially opens January 2016. The event will serve as a “first look” and the store will officially open in January 2016.Location: 3650 North Miami Avenue

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Partner \A Guide to Art Basel: The Must-see Shows and Showcases
Now in its 14th year, Art Basel is bigger and swankier than ever before
Presented By //
T.M. Brown // December 1, 2015

Every year around this time, thousands of dealers, buyers, artists, and scenesters descend on South Florida for Art Basel Miami. Now in its 14th year, the stateside spinoff of the Swiss art fair—and let’s be honest, calling Art Basel an art fair is like calling the Pope a priest—is bigger and swankier than ever before, attracting galleries from all over the globe and providing one of the world’s biggest stages for upcoming artists.

Before we get to all the shows you should be heading to while you’re in Miami, we here at SPIN want to hook you up with an exclusive invitation to K-PAX, a launch event to showcase the collaboration between PAX + K-HOLE, on the rooftop of the Gale South Beach this Friday, December 4th at 5:00 PM, brought to you by the folks at PAX vaporizers.

If SXSW moved to Berlin for a year, started wearing a lot of Acne and Gosha Rubchinskiy, and got really into DJ Rashad and Rødhåd, you’d have III Points. The three-year old art, tech, and music festival is quickly becoming a compulsory event for people who have traditionally flocked to Austin in March, so when they decide to throw a three-night concert series in the middle of Art Basel, you know it’s going to be good.

Life and Death Showcase with Richie Hawtin (Thursday, December 3 at 9:00 PM)

III Points Art Basel’s opening night brings iconic label Life and Death to Miami for the fourth time in as many years and the Italian powerhouse did not disappoint with its lineup. The showcase at Mana Wynwood brings Tale of Us, Mind Against, and Thugfucker to the DJ booth, providing a collection of artists that weave the worlds of pop, house, funk, and disco into a singular soundtrack. Oh, and techno legend Richie Hawtin just announced he’ll be joining the Life and Death crew as a special guest so those tickets are going to be hard to come by.

Jamie XX and Four Tet (Friday, December 4 at 9:00 PM)

Jamie xx and Four Tet combine forces once again to provide the centerpiece of III Points concert series. If you haven’t heard what these boys can do when they’re in the booth together, listen to their exceptional BBC One Essential Mix from March and prepare to be blown away by the effortless combination of everything from jungle to electro pop to soul into one smooth set. Both are finishing years filled with international acclaim so this set will be something of a victory lap and we’re all the richer for it.

A$AP Rocky and Kaytranada (Saturday, December 5 at 9:00 PM)

A$AP Rocky and Kaytranada close out the III Points concert series but this Saturday night set is anything but a come down. Rocky is fresh off a huge year including his sophomore release At. Long. Long. Last. ASAP and rumors that he’s working on a project with Kanye West, while Kaytranada has been pounding the DJ circuit, plying his funky house trade at every club worth its salt the world over. Both should be in rare form at Mana Wynwood.

By far the best name of any party happening in Miami during Art Basel week—or any party in any city during any other week—the yearly shindig is bringing Kim Ann Foxman, Justin Strauss, and Miami Players Club to the Electric Pickle in Wynwood for a suite of DJ sets mixing deep house tracks with just the right amount of tropical groove. To cap the night off, Miami staples Psychic Mirrors will be playing one of their legendary live sets, mixing together soul, funk, and psychedelic sounds into something singularly South Beach.

Ever wanted to see Shamir perform while surrounded by an “immersive” 3000 square foot chandelier designed by the Miami-born, Brooklyn-based artist Diego Montoya? Yeah, that’s what I thought. The minds at Superfine! have put together another expertly curated series of concerts in tandem with their impeccable for contemporary art and design. This time around they’ve brought in Shamir—fresh off his acclaimed debut album Ratchet—for a performance that is larger than life. Literally. That chandelier is going to be huge.

Green Velvet and Tiga (Friday, December 4th at Trade at 11:00 PM)

Any show featuring Green Velvet promises to be as strange as it is fantastic. Techno’s resident oddball is ready to take on Miami alongside Tiga, a 1-2 punch that will satisfy hardcore techno purists and newcomers alike. This show is flying slightly under the radar but don’t sleep on it, these two are the real deal.

DJ Mustard and Fabolous (Saturday, December 5th at Toejam Backlot at 9:00 PM)

DJ Mustard’s fingerprints have been all over the pop and hip-hop landscape for the last year and change so it makes sense that he’s the headliner at this Saturday night show. He’ll be joined by rap stalwart Fabolous for a night of throwback hits mixed with Mustard’s signature sound. RSVP at CLSoundtrack[at]fresh.guestcode.com.

The Fabulous 5.5: Art Basel Planning Guide #3

December 1, 2015

Under the Radar 2015

With dozens of places to go, thousands of things to see, and a million elbows, here are a few special spots. For those of you who make a career at this, or a career out of bragging about this, or travel to go where fewer have gone, here are 5.5 selections.

#4: Say my name; say my name: Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri. New York’s Salon 94 brings this Aboriginal Australian’s oil paintings to life mirroring textiles and mimicking sand sculpture. If you know about dreamtime, here it is in reality. Also at Art Basel.

#3: Joris Van de Moortel: This Belgian artist from Antwerp will present his solo work for the first time in the USA presented by the Denis Gardarin Gallery at UNTITLED. The art teacher’s question, “What is going on in this picture?” earns a lengthy response with works from Rotten Sun, Van de Moortel’s sculpted, painted, musical installation.

#2: Larissa Bates at NADA in the Fountainebleau. Out of Vermont, Costa Rica, St. Augustine’s Monya Rowe Gallery and ARTADIA, there is something of Italy 1450, Ubud 1980, and Tokyo 2005 in one painting, then outback, desert, and prep school in the next.

#1: Jennifer Rubell is always on point. Over the years, she has fed Miami’s Art Basel crowd breakfast a dozen times – things like oatmeal, Sun Maid raisins, yogurt, dripping honey, and massive portions of delicious creativity. This year’s food-based installation: Devotion – bread, butter, and a couple to be married later. 9-11am on December 3 at The Rubell Family Collection 95 NW 29th Street.

.5: The weather forecast is bad, on the radar, not under it.

no commision art fair and untameable house party

CASA BACARDI AT WYNWOOD CURATED BY THE DEAN COLLECTION BRINGS TO LIFE THE CREATIVE VISION OF KASSEEM DEAN (SWIZZ BEATZ) THROUGH HIS PARTNERSHIP WITH BACARDI. SWIZZ HAS PERSONALLY CURATED AN INNOVATIVE CONVERGENCE OF ART AND MUSIC DURING ART BASEL MIAMI – A THREE-DAY EXPERIENTIAL TAKEOVER SHOWCASING EMERGING ARTISTS ALONGSIDE NOTABLE A-LIST TALENT AND INCLUDES THE DEAN COLLECTION’S NO COMMISSION ART FAIR AND BACARDI’S UNTAMEABLE HOUSE PARTY CONCERT SERIES.

December 3-5

35 NE 29th St.

Miami

FL

NO COMMISSION ART FAIR FREE TO PUBLIC

OPEN DAILY 11-8PM

The North American Premiere Of Isaac Julien’s Commission For The Rolls-Royce Art Programme To Be Shown During Art Basel In Miami Beach

GOODWOOD, England, Nov. 17, 2015 — Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, in partnership with the National YoungArts Foundation, will present the North American debut of Isaac Julien’s work Stones Against Diamonds (Ice Cave) during Art Basel in Miami Beach 2015. The work by the Turner Prize nominated artist, commissioned as part of the Rolls‑Royce Art Programme, will be shown from 1-5 December 2015 at the National YoungArts Foundation ­– located at the nexus of Miami’s Wynwood Arts District, Arts and Entertainment District and Edgewater. The video installation will fill the interior of the magnificent YoungArts Jewel Box across 15 screens, the largest and most impressive presentation of the work to date.

UBS Art Collection Highlights

This year’s annual presentation of work from the UBS Art Collection explores the theme of Inside:Out, complementing and drawing inspiration from the bright, airy and sophisticated redesign of the UBS Lounge and its new hanging garden. The installation features approximately 30 works of art by 15 artists that reflect the notion of bringing the outside in, breaking down barriers between fiction and reality and between public and private space to create images inspired by fantasy, pleasure, sensation, nature and alternative landscapes. A highlight is the newly acquired Native Land (2014), a lightbox by Doug Aitken. Filled with a mosaic of colorful roadside signs, this work highlights the intrusion of advertisements in the American landscape. Additional featured artists include Vija Celmins, Francesco Clemente, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Gilbert & George, Andreas Gursky, Catherine Opie, Marc Quinn, Caio Reisewitz, Gerhard Richter, Pipilotti Rist, David Schnell, Simmons & Burke, Xaviera Simmons, Thomas Struth and Corinne Wasmuht. The works, selected by UBS Art Collection Curator for the Americas Jacqueline Lewis, represent a globally diverse range of artists, themes and media, including installations, kinetic sculpture, painting, drawing and photography.

LITTLEST SISTER FAIR

Gallerist Anthony Spinello launches his Little River space with the fourth Littlest Sister, a “faux” invitation art fair featuring 10 unrepresented women-identified Miami artists in a presentation curated by Sofia Bastidas. Each artist has a solo booth; the fair also includes a sector on sound and performance presentations and a series of critical panels exploring arts and real estate, writing, design and collecting. 7221 NW Second Ave.; littlestsister.com. 8-11 p.m. Monday; noon-7 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. Free.

Your All-Encompassing Guide to Miami’s Sprawling Art Scene

To the contemporary art set, Miami is a place of annual pilgrimage, where productivity and decadence play nice. Each December, gallerists, collectors, artists, and curators make their way to the palm-studded metropolis to sell their wares, mount exhibitions, and party in duds that would make Miami Vice’s Crockett and Tubbs proud. Art Basel in Miami Beach might be considered the nucleus of this activity, but with satellite fairs and ephemeral exhibitions opening in Art Deco monuments and beach bungalows alike, it’s high time to take a comprehensive look at what’s happening across the city’s sprawl, from South Beach to Little Haiti.

With guidance from four Miamians—gallerist Nina Johnson-Milewski, artist Emmett Moore, curator Diana Nawi, and collector and philanthropist Jorge Perez—we highlight the art spaces and watering holes of a city where beaches and swamps, American and Latin American traditions, and collections of rare palm trees and blue chip art collide. Our take away: even after the art-crowd’s dust settles, Miami is a mysteriously enchanting place where cultural output of all persuasions churns.

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Miami Beach

Photos by Gesi Schilling.

Edged by sherbet-hued high-rises and beaches dotted with hotel lounge chairs, this skinny strip of land—some call it a sandbar on steroids—is where Miami’s more flamboyant character traits originate. Separated from the mainland by Biscayne Bay, this is the sandy ground on which the holiest Art Deco edifices, flashiest clubs, and the smallest bathing suits consort. It’s also home to sprawling art fairs, beachside pop-up projects, old-school restaurants, and dive bars heralded by glowing neons that look like they were forged in the ’50s.

Miami Beach Convention Center, 1901 Convention Center Drive

After Art Basel expanded to Miami in 2002, settling into the Miami Beach Convention Center (between the beach and the Botanical Garden), the city quickly became an annual stop for collectors and artists. As the parent of an ever-growing brood of art fairs that crop up during the first week of December, this mainstay is the first stop for many people, thanks to its mix of booths from the biggest, bluest-chip galleries and ambitious younger spaces, curated projects, and a constant flow of programming.

Across the street from Art Basel, this sophisticated fair hosts a robust cohort of galleries focused on contemporary and historic design, from immersive architectural environments to jewel-like light fixtures that fit in the palm of your hand, created by the world’s most inspired designers—Giò Ponti, Maria Pergay, and Julie Richoz among them.

2100 COLLINS AVENUE

Though this museum, founded in 1963 and housed in an impeccably preserved Art Deco structure, is currently under renovation, conceptual artist Sylvie Fleury is hanging her site-specific Eternity Now on the building’s facade from December 1st through May 31st, 2016.

The glowing neon sign is a part of Art Basel and the Bass’s five-year-running public art collaboration in Collins Park, which is adjacent to the museum. This installment, curated by Public Art Fund’s Nicholas Baume, brings works by Sam Falls, Katharina Grosse, Jacob Kassay, and Hank Willis Thomas to the lush lawn.

D. Nautilus, a SIXTY Hotel

1825 COLLINS AVENUE

Two blocks away and right off the beach, a shiny renovation of this hotel is accompanied by activations from “Greater New York” breakout artist Mira Dancy (with a sprawling mural), Katherine Bernhardt (with a plucky fresco on the floor of one of the pools), Eddie Peake (with a mirrored rooftop installation), and other works tucked playfully into idiosyncratic spaces throughout the compound. Curated by Artsy’s Elena Soboleva, Artsy Projects: Nautilus is a collaboration between Artsy and the hotel.

E. The Standard Spa Miami Beach

40 ISLAND AVENUE

Swing by the swank Standard hotel, just off Miami Beach on Belle Isle, for a snack on its expansive deck, or pick up one of Miami-based artist Jim Drain’s limited-edition posters, released for fair week.

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South Beach

Ocean Drive and 12th Street

This curatorially driven satellite fair on the beach boasts booths by The Hole, Taymour Grahne, Steve Turner, and even Aperture Foundation. Throughout the week, performances move through the tent and its surrounding landscape. Don’t miss artist and choreographer Madeleine Hollander’s MILE, beginning each day on the east side of the structure at 4 p.m. Also on our radar is UNTITLED Radio, a series of daily radio shows that replace traditional art fair panel discussions.

801 Ocean Drive

This year marks Scope’s 15th anniversary in Miami. They bring 120 exhibitors along with curated sections Juxtapoz Presents, the Breeder Program, and FEATURE, the last featuring 10 booths that highlight new approaches to photography.

C. La Sandwicherie

229 14th Street

For a much needed dose of sustenance after a long day of fair hopping, grab a stool at La Sandwicherie’s counter, where you’ll likely devour one of their signature sandwiches—all available on a croissant in lieu of bread or bun. Wash it down with a smoothie or early evening beer. Or come back late night for a snack and hazy conversation with the post-party art crowd. It’s one of the few places in South Beach that’s open very late—until 5 a.m.

E. Wolfsonian-FIU

1001 Washington Avenue

This museum is one of the crown jewels of Miami curiosities. Founded by Miami philanthropist and passionate collector-wanderer Mitchell Wolfson in 1986 to house his ever-growing collection of decorative art and propaganda—his collecting habits famously began with a stockpile of treasured vintage hotel keys—this wunderkammer is housed in a boxy, stunningly beautiful Mediterranean Revival building. Up now, don’t miss “Margin of Error,” which takes a look at “cultural responses to mechanical mastery and engineered catastrophes of the modern age—the shipwrecks, crashes, explosions, collapses, and novel types of workplace injury that interrupt the path of progress.”

F. Puerto Sagua

700 Collins Avenue

Insider tip: For a quick, low-key, and delicious bite (don’t miss the flan), take a seat at this Cuban diner—and take home one of their fantastic paper placemats, complete with a vintage Miami map. Take note: after a kitchen fire, Puerto Sagua has temporarily closed its doors but is set to reopen on November 30th, just in time for fair week.

G / H / I. Joe’s, Milo’s, and Prime 112

11 Washington Avenue; 730 First Street; 112 Ocean Drive

Insider tip: For a longer, more luxurious meal, try one of Jorge Perez’s favorites: Joe’s for stone crabs, a local delicacy (everyone wears bibs); Milo’s for fresh fish; and Prime 112 for a nice big steak.

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North Beach

A. Faena Hotel

3201 Collins Avenue

Collector and hotelier Alan Faena’s newest complex fuses a freshly minted hotel with an ambitious art space called Faena Forum, designed by Rem Koolhaas’s OMA. While the Forum won’t open until spring 2016, its programming kicks off—and into the streets, during the first week of December, when assume vivid astro focus installs a kaleidoscopic roller-disco on the beach. It’s open to the public, who can take a spin to DJ sets.

B. EDITION Hotel

2901 Collins Avenue

While it might be best known for the long lines that amass outside its club (cool-kid magnet BASEMENT), EDITION hosts a set of diamond-in-the-rough projects in its poolside bungalows. If you can find them through the long marble lobby and stand of towering potted banana plants, Louis B. James (Bungalow 262) shows virtual reality-laced works by Jeremy Couillard, and Harper’s Books (Bungalow 252) hosts a signing with artist Sue Williams of her new, gorgeous monograph on December 2nd.

The Fontainebleau Miami Beach, 4441 Collins Avenue

Making a move from the charmingly retro Deauville Beach Resort way uptown to the high-gloss Fontainebleau marks a big shift for the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) fair, which is focused on younger galleries. From L.A.’s Anat Ebgi to Berlin’s SANDY BROWN to New York’s Karma, its exhibitors are known for bringing an inspired mix of new work into the fold.

Indian Beach Park, 4601 Collins Avenue

A couple of blocks north is another fair that’s carved a place for itself on the main drag. From mainstay galleries like Yancey Richardson to groundbreaking nonprofits like Visual AIDS and RxArt, most booths here mount focused presentations of works of two to three artists. Don’t miss the fair’s curated section, PLAY, surfacing innovative video and new media selections from idiosyncratic New York-based curator Stacy Engman.

Deauville Beach Resort, 6701 Collins Avenue

Take a cab a few minutes north, and you’ll find satellite fairs Miami Project and Art on Paper, taking NADA’s place at the Deauville Beach Resort. Also filling this hub is a dynamic selection of performance, installation, and new media interventions from SATELLITE, a multipart curatorial effort. We’re especially excited that Brooklyn bar and concert venue Trans Pecos is setting up shop there with sets by Fade to Mind and Michael Beharie, among others.

F. Sandbar Lounge

6752 Collins Avenue

Insider tip: Across the street, visit Sandbar Lounge, a sand-covered dive bar for a drink and game of pool after a long day trekking up the beach.

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Design District

As you pass across the causeway that traverses Biscayne Bay, Downtown Miami’s skyline comes into focus. Behind it lie some of the city’s most dynamic cultural spaces. You might first land in the city’s Design District, just north of highway 195, where boxy warehouses and parking garages have, in recent years, been converted into sharp design shops, art galleries, and restaurants.

4040 NE 2nd Avenue

While its new Aranguren & Gallegos Arquitectos-designed building begins construction, the one-year-old ICA brings a strong assortment of contemporary exhibitions to its temporary home. This season surfaces a solo exhibition by radical video artist Alex Bag, which Diana Nawi is keenly anticipating. For his part, Emmett Moore is looking forward to future programming: “I’m excited to see the new ICA building. They’ve managed to put on some great shows in their temporary space so I can only imagine what’s in store.”

B. de la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space

23 NE 41st Street

Around the corner, visit one of Miami’s acclaimed private art collections, brought into the public sphere by Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz. This year, the group show “You’ve Got to Know the Rules…To Break Them” promises irreverent highlights from the couple’s encyclopedic holdings of today’s most influential work.Insider tip: “The private collections in Miami are amazing troves of contemporary art,” says Diana Nawi.

Since its founding in 1998, this artist-run nonprofit space has produced a steady stream of experimental projects. This month, it’s a platform for ambitious work by a bevy of young artists—sculptor Martha Friedman, choreographer Silas Riener, installation artist Beatriz Monteavaro, and conceptual artist Martine Syms.

Insider tip: And as you traverse the city, look out for Syms’s NITE LIFE—graphic prints, emblazoned with phrases like “Darling It Won’t Be The Same Always” plastered on city buses and bus stops. They resemble mid-1900s “Chitlin’ Circuit” posters, which advertised shows at venues where black musicians could perform freely and securely during segregation.

D. Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian’s “UNREALISM” at the Moore Building

191 NE 40th Street

Sometime rivals Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian embark on their first collaboration over four floors (about 28,000 square feet) of this Design District architectural gem. Their joint curatorial project, “UNREALISM,” brings together artists—from John Currin to Elizabeth Peyton to Jamian Juliano-Villani—representing a renaissance in figuration.

F. Mandolin

4312 NE 2nd Avenue

Insider tip: For lunch or dinner, try one of Nina Johnson-Milewski’s favorites, Mandolin: “It’s such a lovely atmosphere, owned and operated by the nicest people.” It also serves some of the city’s best seafood, on a hidden patio dotted with sky blue chairs and fresh flowers.

G. Michael’s Genuine

130 NE 40th Street

Insider tip: Or for heartier fare in an equally unhurried environment, grab a seat at Michael’s Genuine, opened by James Beard-honored Michael Schwartz. It’s one of Jorge Perez’s favorites. You’ll have no regrets after devouring the Harris Ranch black angus burger (don’t dare skimp on the brioche bun).

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Little Haiti / North Miami

In the 1800s, this area, north of downtown Miami, was covered with lemon groves, from which it drew its first nickname, “Lemon City.” Today, it’s defined by its Haitian immigrant population and burgeoning art scene.

6315 NW 2nd Avenue

Founded by impresario Nina Johnson-Milewski in 2007, this Miami mainstay recently moved north from Wynwood to a four-building, 15,000 square-foot compound in the heart of Little Haiti. “I’m loving our new home,” says Johnson-Milewski. “For the first time in nearly ten years I have windows and outdoor space. Who knew Vitamin D was so essential?” “Trees in Oolite,” the gallery’s first design exhibition, uses this fresh air to its full advantage. In the complex’s courtyard, brutalist furniture by Emmett Moore, Katie Stout, and Snarkitecture sits among lush mango, avocado, and oak trees. Inside, don’t miss Ann Craven’s solo show of lush skyscapes she painted en plein air in Maine, with the moon and the occasional candle as her only light sources.

7221 NW 2nd Avenue

This experimental space is up to its old boundary-pushing tricks during fair week with “Littlest Sister,” a conceptual exhibition that calls itself a “faux” art fair, with the tagline “Smallest Art Fair, Biggest Balls.” The project gathers “booths” by 10 women-identified artists, all unrepresented and working in painting, installation, new media, and performance.

C. Michael Jon Gallery

255 NE 69th Street

This gallery’s roster is chock full of up-and-coming artists from across the country—Paul Cowan, Math Bass, and JPW3, to name a few. This month, Sofia Leiby brings bright, active paintings that resemble letters and words breaking out of alphabetic confines and wiggling their way to abstraction.

D. Fiorito

5555 NE 2nd Avenue

Insider tip: Travel south past Little Haiti Park and you’ll find Fiorito, a small Argentinian restaurant that’s “a good local spot for a low key dinner,” says Emmett Moore. “I have dreams about their grilled octopus.”

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Wynwood

Wynwood has become the poster child for the rampant expansion of Miami’s art scene to the mainland, and likewise into the city’s streets. Over the last six years, murals have spread across the concrete walls of the district’s abandoned factories and warehouses. Galleries and private collections have followed suit, marking a cultural renaissance for this formerly industrial neighborhood, nicknamed “Little San Juan” for its still-vibrant Puerto Rican community.

A. Wynwood Walls

2520 NW 2nd Avenue

Pioneered by vociferous street art advocate Jeffrey Deitch, along with late real estate developer Tony Goldman, the murals that make up Wynwood Walls were some of the first carrots to draw the international art set to Wynwood in 2009. Every year, new murals are added to the colorful cohort that includes street art’s most influential names—and some of its undisputed masterworks—from Aiko to Shepard Fairey to Futura to Os Gemeos. This year, 14 new murals and installations (by Fafi, Crash, Logan Hicks, and more) are unveiled.

B. Rubell Family Collection

95 NW 29th Street

Amassed by charismatic patrons Donald and Mera Rubell, this expansive collection is housed in a monumental 45,000-square-foot space that was once owned by the Drug Enforcement Agency. This year, they present “NO MAN’S LAND,” focused on the influential output of female artists ranging from Michele Abeles and Jenny Holzer to Shinique Smith.

Insider tip: Don’t miss Jennifer Rubell’s Devotion, one of the artist’s signature interactive food-based installations that, this year, explores buttering bread as an act of intimacy and interpersonal connection, on December 3rd from 9–11 a.m.

C. The Margulies Collection at the WAREhOUSE

591 NW 27th Street

Housed in a repurposed Wynwood warehouse, this must-see private collection belongs to Miamian Martin Z. Margulies. This year, don’t miss new exhibitions of work by Anselm Kiefer and Susan Philipsz, as well as recent acquisitions of pieces by Mark Handforth, Lawrence Carroll, and more.

D. Spencer Finch’s Ice Cream Truck

3401 NE 1st Avenue

Insider tip: While strolling through the neighborhood, drop by artist Spencer Finch’s ice cream truck. “His solar-powered truck will provide anyone in the area with edible frozen works of art free of charge,” explains Jorge Perez.

3101 NE 1st Avenue

These sister art fairs, the 26-year-old Art Miami and the four-year-old Context, are must-see stops in Wynwood.

H / I. Panther Coffee, Gramps

1875 Purdy Avenue; 176 NW 24th Street

Insider tip: For a caffeine boost, pass through a the doors of a Barry McGee mural-swathed building to Panther Coffee. Or for a stiff drink among creative Miamians, try Gramps, “pretty much the only bar I got to,” says Emmett Moore. “It has a lot of the qualities of old Miami dive bars with some silly artsy stuff mixed in.”

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Park West/Downtown

Taking the southern route from Miami Beach to the mainland, across the MacArthur Causeway, you’ll land in Park West, with Downtown Miami just south of you. Here, skyscrapers house big business and club culture alike. In recent years, the adjacent waterfront, formerly monopolized by the run-down Millennium Park, has transformed into Museum Park, an impeccably manicured landscape of gardens and cultural centers.

1103 Biscayne Boulevard

This stunning museum, which opened its Herzog & de Meuron-designed doors in 2013, recently brought star curator Franklin Sirmans on as director to helm its ambitious program. This fall, don’t miss Nari Ward’s mid-career retrospective, “Sun Splashed,” curated by Diana Nawi, and Miami-based artist Nicolas Lobo’s “The Leisure Pit,” which showcases large-scale concrete sculptures, festooned with the occasional flip-flop, that he forged in a swimming pool.

B. Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation

1018 North Miami Avenue

This stunning building, its facade covered in over one million tiles that together resemble a verdant junglescape, houses patron Ella Fontanals-Cisneros’s comprehensive collection of primarily Latin American art. Up now, don’t miss Cuban artist Gustavo Pérez Monzón’s “Tramas.”

C / D / E. The Corner, NIU Kitchen, and Zuma

1035 N. Miami Avenue; 134 NE 2nd Avenue; 270 Biscayne Boulevard Way

Insider tip: For a cocktail (we recommend their Hurricane, complete with passion fruit shrub and pineapple) pop into The Corner, Diana Nawi’s “go-to bar.” For dinner, head south to NIU Kitchen’s beautiful nook for delicious Catalan fare. Or for a more dramatic dining experience, make a reservation at Zuma for elegant Japanese plates enjoyed from a perch overlooking the water.

Photo by Gesi Schilling.

—Alexxa Gotthardt

A Short List of Miami Art Week Events

Gagosian, Stallone and even Edvard Munch are bringing it this year

Miami Art Week gets a bad rap for being a nonstop rager, what with the Cristal, the caviar and the unicorn rides (trust me, Peter Brant can make that happen). But, in salute to the fact that what’s on view (I’m talking about art, not bikini models) can be just as intoxicating, we picked out just a handful of events that put the emphasis on art.
For a huge and updating list of events, see observer.com/art

MONDAY NOVEMBER 30

Isaac Julien | Commission for Rolls-Royce Art Programme in Miami for Art Basel in Miami BeachOpeningJewel Box, National YoungArts Foundation2100 Biscayne Boulevard
And we’re off! Rolls-Royce, the choice car of haughty old Englishmen and ’90s rappers, has commissioned a new work by influential British artist Isaac Julien titled Stones Against Diamonds (Ice Cave) tobe shown at the YoungArts Jewel Box as part of Art Basel Miami Beach 2015. Covering 15 screens, Mr. Julien’s tour-de-force was shot inside isolated glacial ice caves in the Vatnajökull region of Iceland. The artist interpreted this remote landscape as a metaphor for the subconscious, a place of rich beauty that can only be accessed through psychoanalysis and artistic reflection. Damn that’s deep! So if you’re rollin’ through Miami’s Wynwood District this year in your souped up KIA, maybe stop into this exhibit for a much-needed ego (and id) check.

A moon painting by Anne Craven. (Photo: Courtesy of Maccarone, New York)

Gallery DietAnn Craven’s I Like Blue Opening reception6315 NW 2nd Avenue5-8 p.m.
A teacher’s influence lasts a lifetime. Prime example: One of painter Ann Craven’s former students from a class in 2004 eventually decided to open a gallery in the Basel host-city of Miami. That student was Nina Johnson-Milewski, owner/director of Contemporary art collector favorite, Gallery Diet. Cut to 2015, and that student is about to open a show of her former teacher’s work at her new location in the up-and-coming neighborhood of Little Haiti. Ms. Craven’s painterly goodness is reason enough to see this show—she has serious chops—but this will also be the best place to find crusty die-hard Miami locals, the art lovers who run this city for more than just one week out of the year.

TUESDAY DECEMBER 1

Jarry Deigosian.

“Unrealism”Organized by Gagosian Gallery and Jeffrey DeitchMoore Building3841 NE 2nd Avenue, MiamiOpening reception 5-8 p.m.
This is kind of like when the Penguin and the Riddler teamed up for the very first time: it was fearsome yet wildly entertaining. But what has finally brought former art world foes Larry Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch together under one Design District roof? Figurative painting, of course. You just know it will be a humdinger, too, with works from both the older guard like John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton and David Salle and the very new guard, which includes young hotshots like Jamian Juliano-Vilani and Ella Kruglyanskaya. It’s all part of the evil duo’s diabolical plot to reallocate collector funds to their secret offshore lair, part of a grander scheme to take over the world… Can nothing stop them?

Yo! Adrian, Picasso, et al.

Galerie Gmurzynska ‘dinatoire’ for Germano Celant and Sylvester StalloneVilla Casa Casuarina1116 Ocean Drive8:30 p.m. Private
Guest curator Germano Celant organized the Art Basel Miami booth for this Zurich gallery with some top-notch artists (Picasso, Dubuffet, you know, the usual masterworks) and there’s a party in honor of this fact. It will be held at the sumptuous Villa Casa Casuarina, better known as the former castle-like home of the late fashion designer Gianni Versace, a.k.a. the Versace Mansion. Oh and the star of such mega-hits as Stop or My Mom Will Shoot! and Rhinestone should be making the scene…Mr. Stallone is an accomplished painter himself, f.y.i. Sadly, the event is invite only, but if you Netflix Rocky in your hotel while drinking little bottles of booze from your mini-fridge, you can convince yourself it’s more or less the same thing.

THURSDAY DECEMBER 3

NADA Miami Beach 2012 (Photo: Courtesy of Andrew Russeth)

NADA Miami Beach art fairPrivate previewFontainebleau Miami Beach 4441 Collins Avenue10 a.m.-2 p.m.
The market for emerging art is as dead as Dean Martin, right daddio? Wrong. That’s exactly what these fat cats want you to think so they can get all the primo goodies for themselves. Well, we can’t let that happen, can we? This is what you do: set four alarm clocks the night before. Print out your list of potential emerging art targets. I suggest you wear something that you can move well in (a track suit maybe) and show up to the Fontainbleau a few hours early. You might even want to wear some elbow and kneepads. The Horts are not afraid to throw an elbow or two when jockeying for position in front of the Canada gallery booth, and you shouldn’t be either. Okay, deep breath… Let’s do this.

FRIDAY DECEMBER 4

Miami meet Munch.

Edvard Munch Art AwardShelbourne Hotel South Beach1801 Collins AvenueBy invitation, or Art Basel First ChoiceVIP card
Now this is a big deal. The Edvard Munch Art Award is back after an almost 10-year hiatus, and the winner will be announced in Miami during Basel Week (yes, that thud is the sound of Munch rolling over in his grave.) The 500,000 NOK award (roughly $58,000) is given to “an emerging visual artist, no older than 40 years of age, who has demonstrated exceptional talent within the last five years.” The award also includes a solo exhibition at the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway. Not a bad haul. That, plus the fact that the reception should be filthy with good-looking Scandinavian models, has us considering this party a rather hot ticket.

The Fabulous 5.5: Art Basel Planning Guide #2

November 17, 2015

Top Art Basel Bar Escapes 2015

Walking around during Art Basel exhausts everyone. Feet hurtin’, eyes burnin’, throat in need. Like a European museum tour, it doesn’t take long for one to burn out. If you are of age, liquid respite beckons.

Who has what it takes near the venues?

Consider these 5 places to escape, and a few semi-non-suggestions.

5. Do Not Sit On the Furniture is not a command, but a location at 423 16th Street and the premier beach club for the subterranean set. It’s dark, tight, and a global DJ hideout/paradise. It’s designed like Europe — unpretentious and built for dance.

4. The Regent Cocktail Club: On the corner of 17th and James right in the thick of all things on the Beach rests the regent in the rear of the Gale. No place on the Beach feels this much like the famous old-time, pricey, classy New York City barrooms like the King Cole in the St. Regis or Bemelman’s at the Carlyle. If Cleaveland Jones and his Trio are playing like they often do on Thursday nights, settle in for a few delightful, stirring Brazilian-tinged sets. They got skills.

3. Radio Bar South Beach: All those burnt sienna, earthy tones minus any vestiges of natural light make for a good post-modern, post-apocalyptic vibe. It’s both contemporary and sci-fi Twilight Zone – if something happens outside, you might drink your way through it. Easter Island mugs, a pool table, and stylish cocktails contribute. 814 1st Street and looking very different outside from inside.

2. Broken Shaker: The old Indian Creek Hotel became the Freehand Hostel and these Bar Lab dudes, Gabriel Orta and Elad Zvi got semi-famous and started making freaky cocktails and suddenly, yeah like, you know, the place got very hip. Amid the gorgeous patio garden are serious cocktails making waves like this one a while back: Kale and Pineapple Caipirinha. 2727 Indian Creek Drive. You can also chill upstairs at 27.

1. Repour: Established in 2015, Repour has developed serious rapport going as far as the bar in Miami Beach least likely to reveal photos showcasing it. Laid back on the beach, lots of handwritten stuff, rarely overcrowded, and beautiful drinks make this locally popular spot in the lobby of the Albion a champion.

.5 Less than worthy: Take your pick. Cool bad-secret is out backroom Bodega, gorgeous view/too tight dresses at Juvia, UFC/NRA/armed to the teeth/hidden entrance Foxhole, no one can stand it but Anthony Boudain Club Deuce, but none of which could ever be worse than rock-bottom Clevelander (except maybe Mangos).

MIAMI NEW TIMES

Art Basel Miami Beach 2015 Party Guide

Yes, art world, Art Basel in Miami Beach is almost here. And you can pretend all you want that you’re coming to Miami exclusively for the high-brow art and lectures, but nobody’s going to judge you if you manage to get some serious partying done while you’re in town. This is Miami, and if there’s one thing we’re really good at, it’s partying.

And rest assured, there will be tons of parties during Miami Art Week. From the completely free to invite-only, here is the most complete collection of musically driven, nightlife events — with a dash of art thrown in, because, you know, we aren’t savages. And thanks to a generous 5 a.m. closing time — 24 hours in Miami’s Park West district — there’s plenty of time for you to make an Art Basel mistake. (Good news is that mistake probably has a flight back to New York to catch on Sunday.)

Check back often for updates, because we will continue to update this list as more events get announced. Don’t see your event listed here? Send us an email.

A Very Superfine! Kickoff Party with Baio (of Vampire Weekend) and Lauv, presented by Superfine! House of Art and Design, the Citadel, 8300 NE Second Ave., Miami. Tickets $25 via superfine.design/tickets.

Miami Hearts Design, hosted by Karelle Levy with a KRELwear living installation, with Afrobeta and Millionyoung, presented by Superfine! House of Art and Design, the Citadel, 8300 NE Second Ave., Miami. Tickets $15 via superfine.design/tickets.

Big Times in Little Haiti with Jeffrey Paradise (of Poolside), Gilligan Moss, and Krisp, presented by Superfine! House of Art and Design, the Citadel at 8300 NE Second Ave., Miami. Tickets $25 via superfine.design/tickets.

NADA Miami Beach Will Move to the Fontainebleau Hotel

NADA Miami, the New Art Dealers Alliance’s fair during Art Basel Miami Beach in December, will be moving to the Fontainebleau Hotel on Collins Avenue for its 2015 edition. NADA opened in Miami in 2003, and in 2009 moved to the Deauville Beach Resort, in North Miami Beach, where the fair remained through last year.The de la Cruz Collection is doing a survey show loaded with art stars working in abstraction.

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The ICA Miami

ALEX BAG

On view December 1, 2015 – January 31, 2016

ICA Miami will present a solo exhibition dedicated to video and performance artist Alex Bag during Art Basel Miami Beach in 2015. On view in ICA Miami’s Atrium Gallery, The Van (Redux)* centers around one of Bag’s key videos, The Van, 2001, and features a dramatic new site-specific installation. This exhibition marks the first major U.S. presentation of the artist’s work since 2009.

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The Rubell Family Collection

Isa Genzken, Schauspieler, 2013

NO MAN’S LAND

Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection

December 2, 2015, through May 28, 2016

The Rubell Family Collection/Contemporary Arts Foundation is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, NO MAN’S LAND: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection, on view in Miami from December 2nd, 2015 through May 28th, 2016. This exhibition will focus on and celebrate work made by more than a hundred female artists of different generations, cultures and disciplines. These artists will be represented by paintings, photographs, sculptures and video installations that will entirely occupy the Foundation’s 28-gallery, 45,000-square-foot museum. Some galleries will contain individual presentations while others will present thematic groupings of artists. Several installations have been commissioned specifically for this exhibition.

In order to present the exhibition’s scope and diversity the Foundation will rotate artworks on view throughout the course of the exhibition, presenting different artists at different times. All of the artworks in the exhibition are from the Rubells’ permanent collection.

Other exhibitions organized by the Foundation include 30 Americans, which is currently on view at the Detroit Institute of Art through January 18, 2016 and 28 Chinese which is currently on view at the San Antonio Museum of Art through January 3, 2016. 30 Americans has now been presented at 9 institutions and seen by over one million people.

A fully illustrated catalog with essays will accompany the exhibition. A complimentary audio tour will also be available.

To celebrate the opening of NO MAN’S LAND, Jennifer Rubell will be presenting Devotion, her 12th annual large-scale, food-based installation on December 3, 2015 from 9 to 11 a.m. Devotion will explore the everyday gesture as a medium for the expression of love. Using bread, butter, and a couple engaged to be married as her media, Rubell will transform the simple act of cutting and buttering bread into a poetic exploration of repetition as devotion

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NYTimes
Miami’s art museums are grabbing headlines with splashy staff hires and well-heeled additions to their boards. Yet when it comes to actual artwork, the city’s marquee collectors — and their personally run exhibition spaces — continue to steal the show. The latest example of “The Miami Model”? A sprawling retrospective from the German blue-chip artist Anselm Kiefer that fills nearly a quarter of the 45,000-square-foot Margulies Collection at the Warehouse — a garment factory transformed into a showcase for art holdings of the real estate developer Martin Margulies.The exhibit opens Wednesday, but “it will be up forever,” Mr. Margulies said. “If you think I ever want to go through this again … .” he trailed off, motioning to the flurry of activity throughout the Warehouse this week. Mr. Kiefer directed a small army of art handlers whirring about on hydraulic lifts, racing to install an array of 25,000-pound detritus-filled sculptures, 10-feet-high neo-runic paintings, and charcoal wall inscriptions, just hours before a dinner benefiting the Lotus House homeless shelter. The works include the new sculpture, “Ages of the World,” a 17-foot stack of 400 unfinished canvases, lead books, rubble and dried sunflowers.Mr. Margulies played down the show being any kind of aesthetic shot across the bow of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, despite his public feud with that institution over its continuing to receive millions in tax dollars from a struggling community rather than relying solely on private contributors. Instead, Mr. Margulies hoped visiting schoolchildren would learn from Mr. Kiefer’s handiwork: Don’t let meager materials limit your vision. “They should realize this is the creative process of an artist.”Mr. Kiefer, 70, remains a controversial figure within the art world, alternately lionized and denounced for artwork invoking both World War II Germany and the kabbalah. Some see transcendent statements, others a reduction of the Jewish experience to kitsch. Both factions will find plenty of grist at the Warehouse, where Mr. Kiefer’s works refer to everything from the poet and Nazi labor camp survivor Paul Celan to the Old Testament’s Lilith.“Important work always creates polarization,” Mr. Kiefer explained. “The victims understand. Those people who see in me a glorifier of fascism — when you look into them, you find they have something to hide themselves.” As for the distinction between having his work shown in a “private” versus public museum, Mr. Kiefer hoped the former would proliferate. Collectors should be free to bypass museum curators, he said, and lavishly pursue their own tastes. He compared the phenomenon with the early 20th-century construction of public libraries by moguls like Andrew Carnegie: “I think it was J. P. Morgan who said, ‘If you die rich, it’s a mistake.’ ” BRETT SOKOL

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The de la Cruz Collection

The de la Cruz Collection presents their 2016 exhibition “You’ve Got to Know the Rules…to Break Them.” Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz have selected a group of artists from their personal collection who have been associated with defining 21st century practice. Self-aware of the influence that technology and the rise of consumerism has had on their work, artists exhibited follow the cool forms of Minimalism, Conceptualism and Abstract Expressionism, while injecting their works with subtle negations of their own process. Looking at traditional techniques behind painting and sculpture, these works co-exist timelessly as strategies of stylistic appropriation raise questions of subjectivity and originality.

“You’ve Got to Know the Rules…to Break Them” contextualizes New American Abstraction with German Neo-Expressionism, revealing earnest explorations of the artists technical acumen.Through experimentation, they antagonize accepted practices by drawing upon a variety of themes including cultural, historical and sociopolitical modes.

Per contra, the third floor contains a study in portraiture and memory with the works of Félix González-Torres, Ana Mendieta and Rob Pruitt. By transforming everyday objects and using energetic gestures and repetition, González-Torres, Mendieta and Pruitt accept diverse ideologies and reject the notion that art has a single vantage point.

Mana Contemporary Announces Its 2015 Miami Art Week Program

MIAMI, Nov. 3, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — Mana Contemporary is pleased to announce its second edition of programming during Miami Art Week, taking place from December 3 to 6, 2015. Held at Mana’s 30-acre campus in the Wynwood arts district, this event will inaugurate the central 140,000-square-foot building’s new role as the Mana Wynwood Convention Center.

Mana Contemporary will present a diverse roster of exhibitions and programs, including:

Made in California: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Art FoundationMade in California—a phrase popularized in Ed Ruscha’s groundbreaking text/image works—will be a must-see exhibition during Miami Art Week. Frederick R. Weisman was a pioneering Los Angeles collector of California art as it emerged as a center for contemporary art in the 1960s. He built a collection that includes many of the artists that rose to prominence under the legendary Ferus Gallery, and who went on to define art movements such as Light and Space, Finish Fetish, Postmodernism, and beyond. Under the direction of Mrs. Billie Milam Weisman, the foundation continues to amass a substantial collection of Los Angeles and California art. On view will be works by John Baldessari, Mary Corse, Ron Davis, Sam Francis, Joe Goode, Tim Hawkinson, Robert Irwin, and Ed Ruscha, among many others.

A Sense of Place: Selections from the Jorge M. Pérez CollectionCo-curated by Patricia Hanna and Anelys Alvarez
Including a selection of over 60 works from the collection of Jorge M. Pérez, A Sense of Place is an exhibition that explores cultural identity by way of the collection’s recent acquisitions of works by artists from Latin America. Despite the fact that these artists are working in a globalized world, where technology and communication transcend physical boundaries, many of these artists continue to construct personal and cultural identities by exploring ideas that are specific to their contexts of origin. The show will examine the idea of building cultural identity, and how artists use abstraction, architecture, politics, and memory to carve out a sense of place, and how those concerns are reflected in Pérez as a collector and Miami as a developing city. Pérez, named one of the most influential Hispanics in the U.S. by TIME magazine, is considered a visionary for incorporating the arts into his South Florida real estate developments.

Everything you are I am not: Latin American Art from the Tiroche DeLeon CollectionCurated by Catherine PetitgasEverything you are I am not presents a selection of key works of Latin American contemporary art from the Tiroche DeLeon Collection. Borrowed from a piece in the collection by Argentine artist Adrian Villar Rojas, the title of the exhibition alludes to the common practice among contemporary artists from the region to subvert the canons of mainstream art to produce thought-provoking, often humorous works. With 55 pieces by 30 artists, the exhibition will explore several different facets of this approach. The Tiroche DeLeon Collection was established in January 2011 by Serge Tiroche and Russ DeLeon with a focus on the up and coming art scenes of Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. London-based Petitgas is one of the world’s most respected collectors of Latin American art, as well as a writer, lecturer, and art historian.

PINTA MiamiPINTA Miami is the only curated boutique art fair with a specific geographic focus that looks to be an international platform for Ibero-American art identities and issues. The fair will showcase the best of abstract, concrete, neo-concrete, kinetic, and conceptual art movements. PINTA has updated its format to present a fully curated fair, featuring an international team of recognized curators chosen to direct each of the five newly designated sections of the fair.

Art Basel is just a month away. Last year the fair attracted 73,000 visitors to the Miami Beach Convention Center and this year’s 14th edition looks to be even bigger and better, with 267 galleries from 32 countries exhibiting from December 3rd to the 6th — plus the former head of NYC’s Armory Show, Noah Horowitz, is now running the fair.

Rendering of the new Miami Beach Convention Center
Work on the $615 million renovation of the convention center is scheduled to begin as soon as AB/MB ends, so look for big changes next year. The $20 million re-do of Lincoln Road is also moving along with NYC’s James Corner Field Operations, the firm that did The High Line, winning the contract to update the original Morris Lapidus design from the 1950s.

UNBUILTYves Behar is the recipient of the 2015 Design Miami “Design Visionary Award” and he’ll be honored with a special exhibit in the D/M venue behind the convention center from December 2 through 6. A student team from Harvard was chosen to design the fair’s entrance pavilion for their submission, “UNBUILT,” a collection of foam models of unrealized design projects. Expect thirty five exhibitors including Firma Casa from Brazil, showing new works by the Campana Brothers, and Italian gallery Secondome,with hand-crafted limited editions.

Several changes and new editions are coming to the numerous — 18 and counting — satellite fairs: Miami Project and Art on Paper move into the Deauville Beach Resort (6701 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach), the former site of the NADA fair; while the 13th edition of NADA heads down the street to the Fontainebleau (4441 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach).

The Miami Project is also launching a new spin-off this year called SATELLITE that will show various “experimental” projects in unoccupied properties up near their 73rd Street base. One of those, “Artist-Run,” will fill the rooms in the Ocean Terrace Hotel (7410 Ocean Terrace, Miami Beach) with different installations from 40 artist-run spaces, curated by